A.M. Darke, an associate professor of Performance, Play, & Design at UC Santa Cruz, has spent her career becoming one of the leading voices of diversity in games, especially in the context of representing Black hair. For her latest work Darke has helped compile a program that better represents coily hair in animation. “I'm identifying and directing the targets we need to hit in order to authentically recreate afro-textured hair. I understand the visual and mechanical phenomena unique to coily hair–how Black hair looks and moves,” says Darke.
Darke worked on a team led by Yale computer science professor Theodore Kim. One of the biggest advancements to come out of this project was the ability to create curls that are not a perfect helix. Naturally coily hair textures have “switchbacks”, spots where the hair reverses its curl pattern in the other direction. The project also found ways to show how coily hair separates at the ends, which is different from straight hair patterns.
Kim noted that having Professor Darke as a collaborator on the project helped the team make observations that would have been impossible otherwise.
“This is how computer graphics algorithms have been generated since the very beginning,” Kim said. “An artist and a scientist put their knowledge together and make something really interesting that neither could have done individually.”
“Sometimes I know that Black hair looks or moves a certain way, but I'm trying to figure out why it behaves the way it does, which isn't obvious when you're staring at a mass of curls,” says Darke. “Thankfully, the curl patterns we're creating are the same as I have on my own head, or on my partner's head–who was the hair model for our most recent paper.”
This research, which is the first of its kind, culminated in a paper, Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Coiled Hair, which will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference, a convention with researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists and business professionals who work in computer graphics and interactive technique, in December 2024.
“This research is long overdue, so even if our simulations are rough, we make sure they're culturally respectful. The character model and hairlines were supplied by Open Source Afro Hair Library artists, another project where I lead Black hair graphics from the design side,” says Darke. “It's a really fantastic collaboration between artists and scientists, allowing us to achieve things together that wouldn't be possible on our own.”
