Special effects are about to to reach a pinnacle in realism for Hollywood movies. Image Metrics, a huge company in the realm of facial animation, just created the most photo-realistic computer-generated (CG) face yet known.
At the Siggraph Expo in Los Angeles, they recently demonstrated an animation of actress Emily O'Brien that has entertainment industry types in a joyous uproar. The video, available here, depicts a short a video clip of O'Brien sitting and engaging in a dialogue that, in my opinion, looks just like an HD image of the real deal.
According to an Image Works press release, the animation was created with a patented high-resolution image scanning process:
This newest process from the ICT Graphics Lab places the actor inside a sphere of LED lights, illuminating the talent with a set of polarized spherical gradient illumination patterns while a pair of high-resolution digital cameras takes around 15 photographs in under three seconds.
These patterns allow the shine of the skin to be photographed independently from the main skin tone so that precise colors and characteristics can be calculated at hundreds of measurements per square millimeter. The resulting CG models provide unprecedented detail of natural facial expressions - down to skin pores and fine wrinkles - with perfectly aligned shading information that allows photo-real faces to be rendered under any illumination and viewpoint with standard rendering packages.
David Barton, Image Metrics' producer said, "Out goal was to create a completely convincing, animated computer-generated face...Given the caliber of creative work and talent in our industry, it was a challenging goal, but one we were confident we could accomplish..." Currently ICT's scanning method is the only one capable of acquiring such high-definition images.
Expect James Cameron, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg to make some jaw-dropping films in the coming years.
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