Professor Theodore Kim’s group continues to innovate the geometric simulation of type 4 curls.
Sarah Fenn October 30, 2024 9:57pm
Provided by Haomiao Wu, Alvin Shi, AM Darke, and Theodore Kim.
Theodore Kim watched Jurassic Park and Toy Story when he was in high school, which inspired him to want to work at the intersection of art and technology.
Most recently, he led researchers at Yale University in discovering new visualization methods for Afro-textured hair, deepening his commitment to innovating computational methods for rendering diverse characters.
Kim co-authored “Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Cocked Hair” with AM Darke, assistant professor of digital arts and new media, and Haomiao Wu GRD ’27 and Alvin Shi GRD ’27, fourth-year doctoral students in his lab. Co-authored. At the University of Santa Cruz, California. The manuscript will be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia, an annual computer graphics conference held in Tokyo, Japan, this year from December 3rd to 6th.
Wu and Shi introduced a new mathematical solution for visualizing Afro-textured hair on screen. We solved a long-standing problem with the heavy computational burden of rendering so many complex spirals, which previously hindered proper animation of characters. Color display on a large screen. “Curly-Cue” focuses specifically on the shape of hair, solving the physics simulation problem of interactions between hundreds of thousands of helices.
While many computer graphics researchers consider hair texture to be a settled problem, Kim sees this as a science that ignores underrepresented populations in order to advocate rapid advances in scientific research. This is a sign of a larger trend.
“Social assumptions are built into and hidden from the calculations of our everyday algorithms,” Kim says. “Before our research began, others in the field thought the hair problem was ‘solved,’ when in fact, progress had only been made on the problem of straight hair.”
According to Kim, converting these low-frequency parabolic models used for straight hair into the high-frequency helical models needed to render curly hair is a computational problem that has been largely ignored by researchers. That’s what it means.
Type 4 curls, which “Curly-Cue” focuses on, contain hundreds of thousands of helices that bounce and glide against air, skin, and other hair. This issue can cause inappropriate visualization program crashes and reduce animator dependence. Realistic rendering method.
Kim, who has appeared in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” and “Coco,” pointed out the difficulty of applying academic research to industry. For many years, research aimed at visualizing Afro-textured hair has not received much attention.
“This is a computationally intensive method for calculating the twisting forces associated with highly twisted, coiled hair,” Shi says. “If you try to scale this up to the whole head, it’s very slow. We’re interested in (creating) a simulator that can handle this on a reasonable time scale.”
Not only will the animation move slowly, but the memory may simply be insufficient to hold the amount of data underlying the previous model.
As a result, the animation of black characters may not be realistic. Shi pointed out that while the straight-haired boy running around in the anime is rendered with dynamic and complex hair movements, the same may not be the case for the Afro-haired boy.
Since 2023, Wu and Shi have been repeatedly developing and testing new mathematical models to represent these helices. According to Shi, some of these simulations required more than 17 computationally intensive iterations, each taking several days to render.
The model in this new paper includes three components. Phase locking condenses a waveform-based signal into discrete steps. A switchback where perversion occurs in a spiral. Period skipping separates one hair from the parent curl. All of this is based on high-resolution physics simulations.
Kim has won two Academy Awards in 2023 and 2012. He won the first award for his work on Fizt2, an elastic simulation system he helped design as a senior researcher at Pixar, and the second for his work on wavelet turbulence. The realism of fires and explosions. Much of Kim’s work currently focuses on countering racial bias in the computer graphics industry.
Wu and Shi previously published a “Curly-Cue” precursor paper, “Lifted Curls: A Model for Tightly Cocked Hair Simulation,” in 2023. This is a computational method for simulating individual type 4 curls resulting from a spherical head, but the shape is not taken into account. We discuss interchain interactions as nuanced as this paper.
Now that they have simulated the interactions between the strands, the team may next investigate simulating hairstyles. This could be done in collaboration with other artists, such as Professor Dark, who runs the open-source Afro Hair Library, a three-dimensional model database of black hair textures. And style.
“Artists care about appearance,” Wu says. Dirk’s guidance pointed out when things “just seem wrong,” Kim noted.
Kim said the film industry is fickle in its demands, but there are moments when innovative techniques are brought to the big screen. He expressed hope that the institute’s research will combat claims about the universality of who modern technology serves.
