Thread by @stillgray

I actually agree with this. CGI has been very poor at depicting darker skin tones and black hair styles because the rendering techniques and math used to create realistic lighting and textures was solely developed based on light-skinned/Caucasian models. thepostmillennial.com/anti-racist-co…

If you use subsurface scattering (the usual technique used to depict realistic skin) on darker skin tones the result comes out looking bad, either totally washed out or flat. You need specular reflection for darker tones on any surface, not just skin.

If you want to see what bad rendering techniques look like just look at Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Dark dungeon walls look like they have a layer of plastic over everything.

It's somewhat related, but there's an a real-world issue with poor face detection technology where darker skinned Uber employees have been locked out of the company's internal software because it can't detect them, costing them their jobs.

I know the knee jerk reaction is to be like "who cares? It's not actually racist" but I welcome better graphics in video games and CGI. There's just no reason for the techniques to be so outdated.