Thursday, March 22, 2018

Creating Believable Digital Humans


Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney on creating believable digital humans:

One thing we’ve been interested in over the years is digital humans. Two years ago we showed Senua, the Hellblade character. To this day, that’s pretty much state of the art. But we wanted to see if we could get closer to crossing the uncanny valley. She was great, but you could see that the facial animation wasn’t quite there. The details in the skin and the hair—it was still a fair way from crossing the uncanny valley.

We got together with Cubic Motion and 3Lateral again, the facial reading company, and Vicon, and also our friends at Tencent Next, the research lab at Tencent, to see if we could do something amazing. We put together this project to build a digital human for a presentation in China with Tencent. (...)

GamesBeat: How would you say the new character is an improvement on Senua from Hellblade, in a demo a couple of years ago?

Libreri: There’s more detail in terms of the resolution of the face. Women actually have a tiny bit of peach fuzz, little hairs all over their face, which was impossible to render two years ago, but now the GPUs are fast enough that we can do that. There are 300,000 little tiny hairs on her ears, on her nose. We also improved the shading technology. The skin shading now supports two layers of specular reflection. It also supports back scatter. If you put a light behind her ear, it glows red like it would in the real world.

We added another thing called screen space irradiance, which is the ability to bounce light off her face into her eye sockets. It’s surprising. It seems like a subtle thing, but it makes a big difference as far as believing what’s happening in your eyes. It’s a pretty significant improvement compared to where we got with Senua. We’re happy with the results. It’s still lacking some detail in terms of how the flesh moves.

by Dean Takahashi, Venture Beat |  Read more:
Image: Epic Games
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