14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers at the Imperial College London managed to develop a new method of capturing the extremely subtle and small deformations of the human skin and applying them on a computer-generated model, and they showed their new technique at Siggraph 2015.
Being a joint development between the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and the Imperial College London, the new motion capturing system picks up an actor's physical performance and translates it into a CGI character they're portraying, managing to relay an even bigger degree of very subtle gestures and motions that typical animators might miss.
Although the video capturing of skin, muscle and facial movements has been a key process for producing realistic facial expressions, skin was always a major issue that researchers, animators and developers decided to ignore, focusing much more on facial muscles and expressions. However, this is not the case anymore.
Extreme details may shock some people
Coming up with a new way of capturing small details on different parts of an actor's skin as they stretch and wrinkle while they talk, the researchers managed to create a special rig that will be able to capture an entire face in practical ways. They do that at resolutions of 10 microns.
At such high resolutions, the software can capture even the smallest skin pores and translate them into a mapping texture of an artificial skin that is later put on a CGI character. The results are so realistic that you might not be able to tell the difference between a real person and its CGI incarnation.
Right now, the developers hope to put together a large enough database of facial expressions to mix and combine in order to create artificial characters without the need for actors to wear that face rig.
However, when looking at the clip we embedded below, you will notice that real physical motion and slight mouth movements still fall into that Uncanny Valley, even though the skin texture is unbelievably detailed.
