You are not seeing this situation clearly.

The research presented is useful for far more than models for the "EA
Sims game" as was disparagingly claimed. The title is also fitting since
the methods presented are applicable to quickly building practical
models of bodybuilding. Though the modeling of visceral/organ fat is
specifically excluded for further research, the fat modeling methods
presented are both effective and useful for model generation. Their use
of a quasi-static solver ("Projective Dynamics") on both their muscle
and fat tissue growth modeling to get "near-interactive" run times is
particularly impressive. The single paragraph "conclusion" section of
the paper shows the paper holds interesting, useful, and innovative
research:

>"To our knowledge, our work is the first to simulate physics-based
growth processes of human tissues in computer graphics. We believe
that our system will be instrumental in reducing the often prohibitive
costs of human body modeling and will find applications even beyond the
traditional realms of computer graphics, such as film, games, and visual
effects."

Of course, a lot of people won't have the time to read a long academic
paper, so comment quantity and quality often suffers on submissions of
academic works, but there's a problem here that you seem to be missing.

The comment by 'sigmar' is actually just another example of the long
standing "mean and/or dumb" comment problem on HN [1]. The comment is
both factually wrong and unnecessarily derogatory. That comment should
have been at least down-voted, and possibly even flagged, rather than
defended as some imaginary "core strength" of HN.

The phrase "mean and/or dumb" is from PG, but it's a old and common
problem affecting most discussion forums. Manipulative people regularly
make failed attempts to look smart in public discussions by being
excessively negative, and sadly, it tends to work in so much as lots of
other people are fooled into up-voting them. Anyone can be a totally
uninformed and acrimonious critic, and unfortunately, most human beings
are complete suckers for controversy, so the "mean and/or dumb but
massively up-voted" comment problem tends to be self-reinforcing. The
only good news is, both the bad commenters and the bad up-voters are
quietly handled in code [2].

When you see the "mean and/or dumb" comments, or even the excessively
negative comments, you should down-vote them since they are against the
site guidelines [3, 4]. When a comment is particularly egregious, click
the "X hours ago" link on the comment, and then the 'flag' link (if it's
available). Like the down-vote privilege, the flag privilege also has a
karma threshold to prevent abuse.

When you realize how the excessively negative comments are really just
trying to seek attention, you understand they are just another form of
trolling. In this case, 'sigmar' is doing simple drive-by-trolling; say
something as offensive as possible to get attention, and refuse to back
it up with references when questioned about it. Yep, you got trolled.
But I hope you'll try to look for this sort of negative nonsense in the
future, and down-vote/flag it appropriately.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916