“Digital Ira: Creating a Real-Time Photoreal Digital Actor” by Alexander, Fyffe, Busch, Yu, Jimenez, et al. …

  • ©Oleg Alexander, Graham Fyffe, Jay Busch, Xueming Yu, Jorge Jimenez, Etienne Danvoye, Bernardo Antionazzi, Ryosuke Ichikari, Andrew C. Jones, Paul E. Debevec, Mike Eheler, Zybnek Kysela, and Javier Von Der Pahlen


Abstract:


    In 2008, the “Digital Emily” project [Alexander et al. 2009] showed how a set of high-resolution facial expressions scanned in a light stage could be rigged into a real-time photoreal digital character and driven with video-based facial animation techniques. However, Digital Emily was rendered offline, involved just the front of the face, and was never seen in a tight closeup. In this collaboration between Activision and USC ICT shown at SIGGRAPH 2013’s Real-Time Live venue, we endeavoured to create a real-time, photoreal digital human character which could be seen from any viewpoint, in any lighting, and could perform realistically from video performance capture even in a tight closeup. In addition, we wanted this to run in a real-time game-ready production pipeline, ultimately achieving 180 frames per second for a full-screen character on a two-year old graphics card.

References:


    1. Alexander, O., Rogers, M., Lambeth, W., Chiang, M., and Debevec, P. 2009. Thedigital emily project: photoreal facial modeling and animation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Courses, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH ’09, 12:1–12:15.
    2. Ghosh, A., Fyffe, G., Tunwattanapong, B., Busch, J., Yu, X., and Debevec, P. 2011. Multiview face capture using polarized spherical gradient illumination. ACM Trans. Graph. 30, 6 (Dec.), 129:1–129:10.
    3.Jimenez, J., Jarabo, A., Gutierrez, D., Danvoye, E., and von der Pahlen, J. 2012. Separable subsurface scattering and photorealistic eyes rendering. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH 2012.


Acknowledgements:


    We thank Borom Tunwattanapong, Koki Nagano, Domi Piturro, Alejo von der Pahlen, Joe Alter, Curtis Beeson, Mark Daly, Mark Swain, Jen-Hsun Huang, Ari Shapiro, Valerie Dauphin, and Kathleen Haase for their important assistance and contributions to this work. This work was supported by USA RDECOM, USC, and Activision, Inc; no endorsement is implied.


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