The-Forge Taking Open-Source TressFX Further With Vulkan, Other Framework Improvements

TressFX, the library backed by AMD GPUOpen for advanced hair/fur/grass rendering and used by games like Tomb Raider, is seeing some improvements with its inclusion in The-Forge rendering framework.

The Forge as a reminder is a cross-platform rendering framework developed by think-tank / consulting firm Confetti and added Linux support last year followed by full-featured Vulkan support. This rendering framework that can be used by gaming engines and more also supports macOS/iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation 4, and of course Windows.

Tuesday marked the release of The-Forge 1.22. One of the big improvements in this new feature release is improving their hair rendering support. It turns out Confetti Interactive developers were originally involved with AMD and Crystal Dynamics in developing the original TressFX for Tomb Raider. They have now taken the latest GPUOpen open-source TressFX code and integrated it into their engine while improving it in the process. Their integrated TressFX now works with Direct3D 12 and Vulkan, was also ported to Apple's platforms with Metal, and improvements made along the way. Here is one of their latest hair demos albeit this example was rendered with their framework's D3D12 back-end:

This new forge release also has improved wood and metal rendering, entity component system support for all platforms, and expanded Lua scripting system for all platforms.

More details on the release of The-Forge 1.22 via GitHub.