Naughty Dog Artist: Devs No Longer Have an Excuse to Ignore Black Hairstyles in Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 March 2023 / 3,543 Views
Naughty Dog character artist Del Walker speaking in a video by Kinda Funny said with today's technology in modern games there is no longer any excuse to ignore black hairstyles.
The advantage now is you don’t have an excuse, because the tech can support what you need," said Walker via VideoGamesChronicle. "Now it’s just about having the knowledge and using the resources of Black people to ask ‘is this right?'"
He added, "It starts off with a class, a lesson first, which is usually the thing that takes the most amount of time. Just introducing people to the idea that there are different hair textures.
"With black hair specifically, you want to take [one of] two directions. You either want to simplify as much as possible or want to take the other route where we’re actually going into fine detail by placing loads of polygons, the problem you had with the Xbox 360 era is you didn’t have enough [power] to really fill out on black hair, and you didn’t want to go to simple.
“The advantage now is you don’t have an excuse, because the tech can support what you need. Now it’s just about having the knowledge and using the resources of Black people to ask "is this right?'"
Walker finished by saying that developers should approach those who know more than they do when it comes to getting accurate black hairstyles in games.
"Going to someone that knows a lot more than you," said Walker. "Going to someone who knows about not only being Black but knows Black hair and saying ‘can you just show us lots of things that you think are cool’ and work from there, rather than doing something half baked."
Before working as a character artist at Naughty Dog, he worked at Rocksteady designing Deadshot in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This dude must hate Nintendo games then lol. Hair still be looking blocky like it's from 20 years ago.
These small minute things and turning it into a big deal...
Whatever the skin color I would certainly welcome better looking hair cuts in games. So many can't even get a basic buzz cut right...
That and realistic eyes. lol
Facts. Better hair in games across the board would be much appreciated.
Sounds like it won't be worth all the trouble that devs might get into for trying.
Wat.
I'm brown, where's my people's hair styles in games?
Whenever I see a video or thread on Era/YT that has the title "we need to talk about", it's almost always going to be made a big deal of.
We've had all sorts of Black hairstyles in games for years now... Nintendo's had them, R*'s had them, Platinum, so many others... like why are you trying to push one ethnicities hairstyle over others?.
What's next, "We need to talk about Asian hairstyles, there needs to be way more of those than Black/White".
The one hairstyle that honestly catches my eye are long dreads, and I see those in games already (besides maybe super long, like down to your knees long (and I only saw one woman like that irl and she had the prettiest dreads I'd ever seen).
As long as there is always an option for a 70's style black power then I am 100% for it. And the option to name the character Soul Brother.
Works at Naughty Dogs and say Xbox 360 era?
Uhhhhh... yeah? He likely wasn't workiing for them back then. And I believe he's from the US, where the XBox 360 was the more popular of the two HD consoles by a wide margin. So, it makes sense that he'd phrase it that way.
Still he is now working at Sony.
I just don't see why that would matter.
