Slashdot Mirror
Digital Mouths, Synthetic Faces at MIT and Lucasfilm
jfengel writes "Two separate articles about generating faces automatically. From the Boston Globe, there is a story about MIT scientists putting words into somebody's mouth by splicing together footage. In the samples, I couldn't tell the difference between the synthetic footage and the same person really saying the same thing. (Though it's a little hard to tell at only 81kbps video). And Wired as a lengthy article about generating purely synthetic faces at Lucasfilm. It discusses some of the difficulties in getting it right."
henrik wann jensen is developing some of the most usable algorithms for skin and other translucent materials. He gave a talk last month at Cal as a prospective faculty member. It was fairly impressive.
his home page
rendering skin
rendering smoke
replace 'berserkeley' with 'berkeley' to respond via email.
I work with 3D design, and can certainly attest to the difficulty in mimicking people. The huge numbers of muscles and tiny details of morphology that make up a human face is a tremendously important part of making realism. However, ultimately a surface is needed, as it is, in the end, the light that is reflected back to our eyes. How real the surface looks is a required part of the equation, and some of the new advancements being made in rendering are quite exciting to me. For instance, many older raytracers only handle how light directly reflects off the surface of a texture. But in reality, things like human skin are not opaque, but are slightly translucent. The light passes into the skin, reflects off things like blood vessels, and exits again. Light also behaves in other interesting ways in certain situations. And some effects are simply dependent on computational power. Radiosity, for instance, can make scenes look much more realistic, but is too cycle-hungry to be used all the time in full-screen video. Being able to set these sorts of properties without having to program complex custom render modules for each movie will go a long way towards making artificial people more common.
It's easy to build a cartoon of a human but it is difficult to animate a real person that you can compare videos with.
Huh?! I work as a Sr. VFX guy, and CGI (Computer Generated Imaging) for facial animation is one of the most complex things to do!
Basically, there are so many muscles in the face and so many nuances that it is very difficult to emulate a realistic face. Chris Landreth is a director at Alias|wavefront with whom I had the "pleasure" of working with. His entire focus has mainly been with facial animation. And even with his talent, facial animation still doesn't look 100% realistic.
Check out the book: Computer Facial Animation to get a glimpse at the mathematics, anatomy, and other technical hurdles being overcome in this arena.
Vital Idea
Wow, did you write that? That was an impressive bit of sci-fi prose. I found it fascinating and believable. I think the 'review' seemed very real to me largely because of the unfamiliar jargon and details interspersed in it. Reminds me of the entire slang language Anthony Burgess made up for A Clockwork Orange.