From Spider-Man to Avatar: Achieving Photoreal Digital Actors, Paul Debevec

Description

Somewhere between "Final Fantasy" in 2001 and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" in 2008, digital actors crossed the "Uncanny Valley" from looking strangely synthetic to believably real. This talk describes some of the key technological advances that have enabled this achievement. For an in-depth example, the talk describes how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create "Digital Emily", a collaboration between our laboratory and Image Metrics. Actress Emily O'Brien was scanned in Light Stage 5 in 33 facial poses at the resolution of skin pores and fine wrinkles. These scans were assembled into a rigged face model driven by Image Metrics' video-based animation software, and the resulting photoreal facial animation premiered at SIGGRAPH 2008. The talk also presents a 3D teleconferencing system that uses live facial scanning and an autostereoscopic display to transmit a person's face in 3D and make eye contact with remote collaborators, and a new head-mounted facial performance-capture system based on photometric stereo.

Period	16 Mar 2011
Event type	Guest talk
Location	AustriaShow on map