‘This is Black hair’: technological advances are making waves in animation

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For decades, afro-textured hair animation has lagged behind illustrations of straight hairstyles. Renderings of Black characters do not typically represent the plethora of Black hair styles or specific attributes of Black hair: the kink in their strands, the spring in their curls. But now, for the first time ever, researchers have developed algorithms to depict coily, Black hair in computer graphics, a massive step for the portrayal of Black characters.

The findings have been published in a new study, which will be available to animators worldwide. The study is a collaboration between researchers at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Research papers are typically the first step for film studios to gain new techniques for animation, said Theodore Kim, a co-author on the study and a professor of computer science at Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science. “Almost every computer graphics technique that you see on the screen was first published as a research paper,” Kim said, adding that the papers allow scientists at film and game studios to sort through the available research and “[set] the agenda for what they do next year”.

Having codified formulas designed to create coily hair textures is thus historic, with the potential to improve inclusivity in animation. “There’s all these papers on computer graphics algorithms that have been published in the last 50 years, especially on hair,” Kim said. “Nothing has ever tried to get this type of hair before”.

In recent years, the number of Black characters featured in animation has increased: Tiana Rogers in the Disney picture The Princess and the Frog and Joe Gardner in the Pixar movie Soul are some examples of growing diversity. But despite the increase in representation, illustrations of Black hair have remained relatively stagnant. Kim said that animators have failed to capture textures such as type 4C hair, which features tightly-wound curls, because they lacked the formulas to do so, and instead replicated a limited range of styles that have been done before. “There’s only one or two hairstyles that people gravitate towards because they find that it’s culturally approved,” he said. “The vast diversity of type four hair is then lost.”

Typically, the depiction of coily hair in computer graphics is solved through “labor”, said Kim, with animators and artists going in to add details by hand. “If the algorithms didn’t support you, they just had to go in and move each vertex until they got things to look okay”.

Since such adjustments are on an individual basis, depictions of afro-textured hair could look “off” if an animator or artist doesn’t have the “intuition” when it comes to a specific curly hair type. But the latest algorithms could make the process of animating afro-texture hair more standard, as animators will now have formulas to achieve coily hair.

The research that first informed the study started in 2020, when A.M. Darke, a co-author on the paper, founded the Open Source Afro Hair Library (Osahl), a free database with 3D images of Black hair created by Black artists. Prior to the creation of Osahl, 3D asset marketplaces, where animators and 3D artists can shop through models for animation projects, contained racist imagery of Black people, showing them as mammy caricatures or wearing generic tribal wear.

“My goal with the library was to create a new container that not only addressed the representation, but also created a community for Black artists to have discussions around,” said Darke, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s department of performance, play and design. “What should we look like? What do we look like?”

Darke’s work on Osahl generated much excitement on social media and was later highlighted in collaborations with Dove Beauty and Ulta. Their work eventually caught Kim’s attention, who reached out to Darke to speak about issues with hair representation within computer graphics.

In some of the most lauded papers about hair graphics, Darke found that afro-textured hair either “wasn’t represented at all” or was “misrepresented”. In one paper, the provided example for “African hair” was “straight hair”, Darke said. “That, to me, encapsulates the problem … [a person] just thought, ‘Here’s a Black person. They have black hair. This is Black hair.’”

The most recent paper from Kim, Darke and other researchers created algorithms that animate three major attributes of afro-textured hair: “phase locking”, “period skipping” and “switchback”. Phase locking is when coily hair “grows out as a helix” or a “spongy” layer closer to the scalp, before forming more defined curls as the hair grows, Kim said.

Period skipping describes when some hairs “leap out” of a curl pattern, adding the appearance of frizz around a curl. Period skipping, specifically, allows the hair to look “more matte or diffuse”. And switchback is when the direction of a curl changes, creating a “kink”, said Kim, a phenomenon that naturally occurs in plants and polymers.

Systematic barriers within animation, including diversity in hiring, often means improvements on how to better illustrate Black characters can fall to the wayside. “We do not have Black women abundant in computer graphics, which means we don’t have Black women reviewers in the papers,” Kim said. “We don’t have Black people looking at the research saying: ‘Oh, that’s what curly hair looks like, or that’s authentic,’ or even, ‘This is a standard for curly hair.’”

But the latest paper signals a significant change in increasing accurate representation and calling out existing prejudices within computer graphics, specifically the assumption that Black hair is “niche”, Darke said.

“With so many other things, whether it’s food or music or fashion, when you prioritize Black features, Black cultures, it actually opens up creativity for everyone. The Black diaspora pushes culturally in a lot of ways.”

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