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SoCoder -> Link Home -> Science News

 
JL235
Created : 12 April 2010
Edited : 12 April 2010

Photo Realistic?



https://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmily/
A small project to build photo-realistic facial animation using a new setup (I think much of the experiment was to develop how to use the new idea). It's a video of a US daytime TV actress talking about the video company who produced this. They then removed her head and placed in a CGI copy, to say exactly the same lines again (they should have given her lasers for eyes instead or something).

It's a large setup of 156 lights surrounding the actress. She pulls a face and the lights then switch between 15 illumination patterns which are photographed from multiple cameras. The faces she pulls are used to customize a parametric model which is animated to speak her lines. When light hits the skin some of it penetrates and bounces around before comming back out in what is called 'sub-surface scattering' (this is why skin is so difficult to model correctly).

The rig used polarized light, and the cameras can pickup polarized and non-polarized light seperately. When light hits the skin the light that bounces straight off stays, this is picked up as specular highlighting (which also gives the bump mapping for the surface). The light from the sub-surface scattering becomes non-polarized which is used for diffusion. Or it's something like that.

Is it photo realistic? For me there is something about the eyes, something that's not right. But I just can't put my finger on it. Or maybe the actress just has funny eyes???

 

Comments
Monday, 12 April 2010, 15:10
Jayenkai
 		The eyes and the mouth.
For everything they've done, it's really not all that much better.
And, I get the feeling that's not tweakable, either. You couldn't get "Digital Emily" to say "Jibba Jabba Mabba Woop Woop" without getting real Emily to do it first, thus completely borking the entire bloomin' point of it.

Half Life 2's still one of the better realtime things I've seen.. And that's in realtime! Sure it's looking a bit dated, now, but if you took that as a starting point I'm sure you could come up with something that looks better than this, without needing several thousand gigabytes of data to start from!
Monday, 12 April 2010, 21:22
Mog
 		Rockstar uses this tech, so you can see it in action in GTA4, although not as high quality. It works but there's still the uncanny valley in some areas, but it's a step forward.