Hair Rendering II - Hair shader and binary format

The project aims to add three main components to the appleseed render to improve the hair and fur pipeline. Firstly, the addition of per vertex attributes to the curves primitive in order to create a more robust hair fibre curve representation. Secondly, the creation of a hair binary file format to import hair geometry from popular modelling softwares and export the format for ease of data flow in production. It will also support conversion from different binary hair file formats to the new native format. Finally, the addition of an advanced hair shading model that is tuned for production rendering. It is a physically based hair shader that captures the effects of the light scattering through hair fibres. The model is importance sampled and also has various parameters to change physical properties in the hair like refractive index and colour absorption and distribution. This project will fix one of the main deficiencies of the appleseed renderer and help the renderer challenge other production renderers for the mantle of the best.