Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Coiled Hair

This presentation by one of the authors is a good primer on the current issues around Black hair and hairstyles in Hollywood, CGI, and video games, and why this research is important: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tkim.graphics&#x2F;MORETHAN&#x2F;Darke_Slides.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tkim.graphics&#x2F;MORETHAN&#x2F;Darke_Slides.pdf</a>

I usually approach “inclusivity”-driven work with a massive amount of skepticism, but as a black man with highly coiled hair, I have to admit I’m very impressed by this research and work.<p>I used to be really into gaming when I was younger, and a somewhat disappointing aspect of many games for me was character selection. Even when there were dark-skinned characters, I can’t think of a single game within which I could select or build a character that truly looked like me (or close enough), and usually, it came down to the hair. At the end of the day, it was never a big deal and I still had lots of fun, but it would’ve certainly been nice to have better, more relatable, selections, so I appreciate this research!

The short hair example in particular is remarkably realistic. Immediately familiar to this guy who spent most of his childhood with a skin fade, and a massive improvement over the flat image texture or bump maps that are usually used.<p>Because many black people (especially African-Americans) have a mixture of hairtypes, I expect the results to be even better once something like this is implemented alongside existing systems.

As someone who’s spent a lot of their career working on digital humans and respective tooling, seeing research into curly hair is a breath of fresh hair.<p>It’s really difficult to approximate the same way that straight hair is done and there is definitely a very high amount of Eurocentric R&amp;D in this space, which means anything other than a slight frizz doesn’t move right, and has difficulty in rendering correctly. Hair weight specifically is one that is extremely hard to get right and even harder when it’s wet.<p>I also really recommend watching Theodore Kims talks. He’s ex Pixar and highly respected in the field. He’s done fantastic work in highlighting the lack of research for non-straight hair and non-white skin among other things. This talk has been hugely impactful on me and my own work that many millions of people have seen on the big screen and not realized were digital, in no small part because it highlighted what we were missing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ROuE8xYLpX8?si=qUJ0BvcPDyEKOYLk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ROuE8xYLpX8?si=qUJ0BvcPDyEKOYLk</a><p>People might not understand the importance, but it’s hugely significant to call out the lack of research so that we as an industry can fill that hole and improve our own work. We need to represent a wide range of digital humans , and a lack of technology&#x2F;research to represent them means our work doesn’t hold up as strongly.

How much processing power does this require? Can it be done in real time?

I wonder if this becomes relevant also in analyzing real hair, for designing hair-related products etc.

Are they just afraid to use the word &quot;afro&quot;?

This looks great, but 234 Kelvin is almost -40° Celsius. Why so cold?