the average head of hair has 100,000 strands.
each hair strand would need to be made up of many polygons (unless they were perfectly straight strands) and each of those pieces would be a physical object.
let's say each peice of hair is made up of 100 segments, that's 100,000,000 physical objects.
also, each strand would need to be a 3d polygonal object. let's use a triangular prism to save polys'. that would be 5 polygons per segment (one for each side and one for both ends.) that would be 500,000,000 polygons.
so no, they can't.
Heydanbud92
i think they could take the same approach as we do in art. You clump the major pieces together. On most hairstyles there are "clumps" of hair that have little to no movement. Take for instance the pony tail. the hair on the majority of the hair doesnt move at all, the only hair that moves is at the back. That could help reduce any taxing CPU calculations. Alos, there is no need to do it hair by hair. You can "merge" hair strands into a single obeject. Lets say like you said there are 100,000 strands of hair. Why not clump 5 strands of hair into a single obejct that way you end up having 20,000 objects. Yes, its still alot but a farcry from 100,000. And with the relative size of hair, most people wont even notice the difference.
Alot can be done to cheat the system. People with short hair basically dont need each strand to be modeled. People with medium to long hair would more difficult but with the clumping system, it could still look pretty believable. But like a previous poster said, it would tax the system so much that its almost pointless to do so. Your game would suffer more than it would gain.
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