The digital Emily project: achieving a photorealistic digital actor.
The Digital Emily Project uses advanced face scanning, character rigging, performance capture, and compositing to achieve one of the world's first photorealistic digital facial performances. The project scanned the geometry and reflectance of actress Emily O'Brien's face in 33 poses, showing different emotions, gaze directions, and lip formations in a light stage. These high-resolution scans-accurate to skin pores and fine wrinkles-became the basis for building a blendshape-based facial-animation rig whose expressions closely matched the scans. The blendshape rig drove displacement maps to add dynamic surface detail. A video-based facial animation system animated the face according to the performance in a reference video, and the digital face was tracked onto the video's motion and rendered under the same illumination. The result was a realistic 3D digital facial performance credited as one of the first to cross the "uncanny valley" between animated and fully human performances.
Alexander
Oleg
O
University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, USA. oalexander@ict.usc.edu
Rogers
Mike
M
Lambeth
William
W
Chiang
Jen-Yuan
JY
Ma
Wan-Chun
WC
Wang
Chuan-Chang
CC
Debevec
Paul
P
D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008029:Lighting; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological; D009040:Motion Pictures