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More accurately, there are over 300 SIGGRAPH papers on hair. Slide 3, with this headline: > Curly hair in graphics research is limited to “classical European

More accurately, there are over 300 SIGGRAPH papers on hair. Slide 3, with this headline: > Curly hair in graphics research is limited to “classical European locks” Contains this phrase: > which varies from an elongated ellipse for African hair Which leads me to think the Eurocentricity of the other 300 papers is being rather oversold. The Beethoven-looking redhead on the previous slide has two hair styles which are unmistakably models of common African hair textures. Being generous I would guess that the hair was made lighter to show details better? Caucasians presenting with that level of frizz is also not unheard of. Afro-textured hair is certainly a topic worth a few SIGGRAPH monographs all on its own, and a dedicated library is also great. But I suspect that a thorough review of the 300 papers in question would find that the insinuation that none of them treat on the subject of African hair is somewhere between "not supported" and "wildly false".

wizzwizz4 2y ago
I'm inclined to believe that the authors, if they quoted that, read it. The implied claim is that this treatment is inadequate. (My reading is supported by the text on the previous slide: page 23 in the PDF.)
burkaman 2y ago
I am not going to read through all 328 papers to fact check this, but I'm very confident they did do a "thorough review", that's how you start research like this. There's a bit more detail in the course that this presentation is from: > As of 2021, we only found two technical papers that showed Afro-textured hair [Bertails et al. 2005; Patrick et al . 2004]. While some technical papers containing Black hair have started to appear since we published our findings [Hsu et al . 2023; Wang et al. 2023], these usually represent relatively unstyled hair. Some styles have started to appear in short talks [Ogunseitan 2022], but a wide range of intricate, sophisticated, and very common hair styles still lie outside the visual language of computer graphics research. - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664475.3664535 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664475.3664535 (not open access, I can share it if you're interested though) The four papers they mention here are not from SIGGRAPH. The "short talk" was from SIGGRAPH 2022, but as that phrase implies it was a talk and not a paper.
dahart 2y ago
One could read the claim being made as there aren’t any papers that are primarily about Afro-textured hair, nor about Black hair geometry considerations, which is likely true. There might not be that many papers that you could say are primarily about Caucasian hair either, but there most definitely is a lot of straight and wavy hair. I think some Siggraph hair papers do show examples of Afro-textured hair, IMO Darke’s slides here have one (p.23, example (c)) tkim.graphics/MORETHAN/Darke_Slides.pdf Might be worth pointing out there aren’t that many siggraph papers on procedural hair geometry generation, quite a few are on rendering hair and do cover dark/black hair with elliptical cross sections. IIRC there are some papers on blonde hair specifically because it exhibits more visible scattering. Anyway… is there a historical/cultural bias toward Eurocentric hair and not a lot of representation of Black hair? Yes that would probably be totally fair to say. Splitting hairs on whether or not their words are unambiguously and perfectly accurate might be slightly beside the point. Let’s take it as a hint that we can improve, and enjoy a paper that brings new hair generation methods to bear.

wizzwizz4 2y ago

I'm inclined to believe that the authors, if they quoted that, read it. The implied claim is that this treatment is inadequate. (My reading is supported by the text on the previous slide: page 23 in the PDF.)

burkaman 2y ago

I am not going to read through all 328 papers to fact check this, but I'm very confident they did do a "thorough review", that's how you start research like this. There's a bit more detail in the course that this presentation is from: > As of 2021, we only found two technical papers that showed Afro-textured hair [Bertails et al. 2005; Patrick et al . 2004]. While some technical papers containing Black hair have started to appear since we published our findings [Hsu et al . 2023; Wang et al. 2023], these usually represent relatively unstyled hair. Some styles have started to appear in short talks [Ogunseitan 2022], but a wide range of intricate, sophisticated, and very common hair styles still lie outside the visual language of computer graphics research. - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664475.3664535 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664475.3664535 (not open access, I can share it if you're interested though) The four papers they mention here are not from SIGGRAPH. The "short talk" was from SIGGRAPH 2022, but as that phrase implies it was a talk and not a paper.

dahart 2y ago

One could read the claim being made as there aren’t any papers that are primarily about Afro-textured hair, nor about Black hair geometry considerations, which is likely true. There might not be that many papers that you could say are primarily about Caucasian hair either, but there most definitely is a lot of straight and wavy hair. I think some Siggraph hair papers do show examples of Afro-textured hair, IMO Darke’s slides here have one (p.23, example (c)) tkim.graphics/MORETHAN/Darke_Slides.pdf Might be worth pointing out there aren’t that many siggraph papers on procedural hair geometry generation, quite a few are on rendering hair and do cover dark/black hair with elliptical cross sections. IIRC there are some papers on blonde hair specifically because it exhibits more visible scattering. Anyway… is there a historical/cultural bias toward Eurocentric hair and not a lot of representation of Black hair? Yes that would probably be totally fair to say. Splitting hairs on whether or not their words are unambiguously and perfectly accurate might be slightly beside the point. Let’s take it as a hint that we can improve, and enjoy a paper that brings new hair generation methods to bear.