Jig includes a comprehensive solution for rendering photorealistic hair. The speed of our rendering algorithm allows us to render millions of hairs in a reasonable amount of time. The sheer number of hairs we can render greatly increases the realism of the final image. The hairs are generated procedurally in the renderer with a plug-in. As a result, no more than one hair is stored in memory at any given point in time. All attributes of the hair (i.e. color, kink, length, etc.) are mappable with the same layered mapping system used by the shaders. Hair combing may be controlled by sparsely positioning guide hairs on the surface, and interpolating them within the Jig system.

We have found that the largest contributing factor towards the realism of hair is "self-shadowing". This is the ability for a given hair to cast shadows on other hairs and objects. Traditional rendering algorithms exhibit aliasing artifacts in the form of sizzling when rendering large quantities of thin hairs. Jig provides an extremely efficient and high-quality shadowing algorithm that solves this problem.

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