Shea Growth And Retention Regimen 2019

[ElevatedEnergy]

My hair has been in this high bun for a minute, but I still dont feel like taking it down so I misted the outside of it with RoseWater then Shea'd it up. Trying to step back from sha-lacking my hairline down with gel and go back to just using Shea to lay my edges down. I just cant for the life of me get down with the stiff hair that the gel gives me.

 

[ElevatedEnergy]

My shea pudding isn’t slippy enough. I have a hard time applying to my hair especially when my hair is wet/damp. But I don’t have time in the morning to dry my hair before applying.

You might fare better using Shea Nilotica Butter in your mixes. The higher Oleic Acid content would make it easier to apply and also easier for your hair to absorb. It's also pretty creamy on its own, so you wouldn't have to do much whipping or adding additional oils/other ingredients to make it work. HTH

 

[GettingKinky]

You might fare better using Shea Nilotica Butter in your mixes. The higher Oleic Acid content would make it easier to apply and also easier for your hair to absorb. It's also pretty creamy on its own, so you wouldn't have to do much whipping or adding additional oils/other ingredients to make it work. HTH

Thanks! I’ll look into it.

 

[Chicoro]

I took a few mishandling liberties with my hair while I was away but I had my Shea butter to help see me through. This jar I made Feb 24th, is almost finished but I've still got back-up for this blend as I made too much last time. I'm happy too because this mix remained airy and soft throughout.View attachment 445357

I finally clay washed my hair on Sunday. Followed with fermented rice water, (rinsed) and used Shea and gel to seal. On Wednesday, I moisturised the back with water, added a little TMC leave-in, sealed with more shea butter and twisted it up (ends tucked). I haven't messed with my hair since.View attachment 445359

I, Chicoro, on this 14th day of April 2019, nominate and induct @GGsKin into the 2019 Shea Made Hair Unicorn Hall of Fame. She was outted in post # 1647 for that intricate, gorgeous, thick, rope-like twists shaped into a bun hair style. Welcome!

@caribeandiva , please do your thing!

 

[water_n_oil]

Flat ironed this weekend just using my usual shea mix prior to stretching my hair. SSKs were there but not as abundant as I thought they'd be and I think I saw literally only one split end. I'll probably be back to shea'd up curls in a week knowing me.

I shared my last wng in the WNG challenge thread but not here. Used the shea grease and Obia curl custard.

 

[GettingKinky]

@water_n_oil
I know I said this in the other thread, but I have to say it again. Your hair is so black and shiny. And your curls are so stretched. I want my hair to look like yours someday.

 

[water_n_oil]

@water_n_oil
I know I said this in the other thread, but I have to say it again. Your hair is so black and shiny. And your curls are so stretched. I want my hair to look like yours someday.

Thank you! It actually just grazed my shoulders once 100% dry. The back was still pretty wet in that pic. I want to pick up a blow dryer to start stretching my wngs. Happycurlhappygirl on yt has a ton of wng videos if you haven't watched her before.

 

[caribeandiva]

@GGsKin welcome to the Shea made unicorn hall of fame!!

 

[Chicoro]

Flat ironed this weekend just using my usual shea mix prior to stretching my hair. SSKs were there but not as abundant as I thought they'd be and I think I saw literally only one split end. I'll probably be back to shea'd up curls in a week knowing me.

I shared my last wng in the WNG challenge thread but not here. Used the shea grease and Obia curl custard.

Look at how JET Black that hair is. Wait a minute! Those two babies at your house HAVE to be your little sisters. You CAN'T be the mommy, looking 15 years old yourself!

 

[Chicoro]

What? Split ends so few that they are countable? Hair so lubricated that shed hairs just slip out? Braids so moist that there is no need to touch them for seven 7 days? Yes!

That's the power of Shea butter: Guardian and protector of Afro-textured hair!

 

[Chicoro]

Got a hair emergency? Queen Shea doesn't need a Bat Line.
Use your mobile.
She'll pick up!​

 

[Chicoro]

Bring YOUR Afro to the Shea Party!

Because you want to be able to say with pride:

​

 

[Chicoro]

There is NO SUCH THING as UGLY afro-textured hair.
Unless it's on a muppet and not only are they not real, they
don't have afro-textured hair, anyway.

 

[Chicoro]

Honey, so are we! Because you will never know the deep love
Queen Shea can bestow
upon your hair.​

 

[Chicoro]

Let you hair prepare for its closeup!

Queen Shea will ensure it is camera ready!

​

 

[Chicoro]

If you don't value and protect what you have, neither will the world. Not only that, if you allow it, the world will take it and steal it and say it was theirs all along.

 

[Chicoro]

She's animated, but that hair is REAL: Pretty!
She must use Shea butter.

‘The Valley of Gods’ actually took the time to get its protagonist’s hair right, and it looks fantastic.

Chicoro says,"When you value what you have, the world has to follow suit. Never, ever, ever de-value your afro-textured tresses."​

NEVER!​

This is Zora, by the way!


​

 

[Chicoro]

When you respect what you are, so does the world. See the blog post below.​

http://blog.camposanto.com/post/171638832704/zora-is-one-of-the-two-main-characters-in-our


Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.

In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.

Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.

So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.

Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.

As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.

Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.

Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.

Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.

The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.

I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.

Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.

I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.


[boring computer screen image not posted]


Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.

We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.





For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.

There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.

Let the Shea Haired Unicorns say:

Thank God for the Natural Hair Movement and my bedrock, LHCF!
And last but not least, Queen Shea, herself.



​

 

[GGsKin]

I, Chicoro, on this 14th day of April 2019, nominate and induct @GGsKin into the 2019 Shea Made Hair Unicorn Hall of Fame. She was outted in post # 1647 for that intricate, gorgeous, thick, rope-like twists shaped into a bun hair style. Welcome!

@caribeandiva , please do your thing!

@GGsKin welcome to the Shea made unicorn hall of fame!!
View attachment 445447

Thank you! I'm looking forward to the end of year shindig.

 

[Chicoro]

Thank you! I'm looking forward to the end of year shindig.

The celebration and shindig was weak last year. I felt pretty let down by how anticlimactic the whole thing was. I felt like the Extravaganza didn't do the thread justice.

I'm considering a 31 Day Countdown December 2019. Perhaps a snippet of each day, of something memorable, from some part of this thread we experienced during our 2019 Shea Challenge!

I've got about 8 months to think about it. This time, we are going out with a bang!

 

[water_n_oil]

Look at how JET Black that hair is. Wait a minute! Those two babies at your house HAVE to be your little sisters. You CAN'T be the mommy, looking 15 years old yourself!

Lol having a baby face is a blessing and a curse. I turn 31 on the 21st .

 

[GettingKinky]

I don’t play video games, but I want to support In the Valley of the Gods for all the effort they put into Zora.

 

[Chicoro]

I don’t play video games, but I want to support In the Valley of the Gods for all the effort they put into Zora.

I know, right. But because of Zora, I just may start!

 

[SunkissedLife]

When you respect what you are, so does the world. See the blog post below.​

http://blog.camposanto.com/post/171638832704/zora-is-one-of-the-two-main-characters-in-our


Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.

In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.

Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.

So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.

Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.

As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.

Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.

Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.

Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.

The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.

I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.

Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.

I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.


[boring computer screen image not posted]


Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.

We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.





For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.

There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.

Let the Shea Haired Unicorns say:

Thank God for the Natural Hair Movement and my bedrock, LHCF!
And last but not least, Queen Shea, herself.


View attachment 445451
​

As a gamer girl and a pro love yourself person I LOVED this. So interesting to read and grateful to them for taking the time to try to get her hair right. I will definitely be looking more into this. Thanks for sharing!

 

[water_n_oil]

Queen shea in the building. Her hair usually has little shine because of its natural color. I used the same wng combo I used on earlier in the week.

 

[snoop]

I'm still here and I'm still using my shea! Last month I had to make a new batch and for the first time ever I was actually able to make it fluffy! I'm talking about about 8 years on and off of trying and not realizing that all I needed to do was add more oil.

The shea has been helping my hair to clump nicely and detangling really is so much easier. I'm leaving shea glow marks everywhere, but this time it's worth it!

Last weekend, I used fermented rice water to rinse my hair for the first time. I tried it again on Monday. Between the RW and Queen Shea my hair this week has been feeling soft looking shiny and healthy!

 

[Chicoro]

Queen shea in the building. Her hair usually has little shine because of its natural color. I used the same wng combo I used on earlier in the week.

She has a beautiful sheen on her hair. The shine is deep, and healthy. Look how it is moving and flowing in the wind.

 

[Chicoro]

I'm still here and I'm still using my shea! Last month I had to make a new batch and for the first time ever I was actually able to make it fluffy! I'm talking about about 8 years on and off of trying and not realizing that all I needed to do was add more oil.

The shea has been helping my hair to clump nicely and detangling really is so much easier. I'm leaving shea glow marks everywhere, but this time it's worth it!

Last weekend, I used fermented rice water to rinse my hair for the first time. I tried it again on Monday. Between the RW and Queen Shea my hair this week has been feeling soft looking shiny and healthy!

Congratulations! I was giving you the Eagle Eye in that rice water thread!

 

[Chicoro]

I made my second batch of CoffeeOilSheaButterCocoaButter Mix. Yes, that's one word! I poured in a ton of my coffee oil. It had to be about 3 cups.

Recipe:

• Melt cocoa butter in double boiler
• Melt Shea butter
• Remove from heat
• Pour in Coffee Oil (It soaked about 1 to 2 months) It smells soooooo good!
• Mix together
• Put in fridge overnight (a la @ElevatedEnergy )
• Next day break up the hard butter with a spoon
• Add in another cup of the coffee oil
• Whip it up!
• Add in essential oil throughout process
• Top off with essential oil

Even scooping out mounds, and mounds of butter, this will last me a MINIMUM of 1 month!

The texture is like heavy whipping cream. Wow! This is used exclusively for my body. I love to saturate my body in this after I dry off in the shower. Then I put on my housecoat. My housecoat retains the scent until I wash it again. I smell good.

The huge purpose for this: To help remove my scars!



I retained some pure coffee oil to add to my scrubs to help beautify my booty and the back of my thighs for summer.

Golden Unicorn on the Rise!

Time to buy some coffee beans today and start another batch of concentrated, coffee oil. I'm so excited!

 

[Chicoro]

I declare that I, Chicoro, am magazine, camera ready for Summer 2019!

Thank you Queen Shea and my Shea Sisters!​