Slashdot Mirror
Perfect Digital Skin
ILMfan writes "BBC Technology is describing a new graphics algorithm for creating perfect virtual skin. This technique by graphics wizard Henrik Jensen (the guy who invented photon mapping) is already being used in movies (it was used on Gollum in Lord of the Rings, and it will be used in the soon-to-be-released van Helsing movie). And perhaps more exciting is that several game companies are planning on using it for their next generation games. So John Carmack are you listening? Any chance this can be included in DOOM3? Of course there are endless other opportunities for virtual humans with perfect skin :-)"
So John Carmack are you listening? Any chance this can be included in DOOM3?
No, but you should see the urine stream they've mastered for Duke Nukem Forever. WOW!
So John Carmack are you listening? Any chance this can be included in DOOM3?
Sure, add it all in! That way when DOOM3 is finally released it will only be available bundled with a new Cray X1.
Trolling is a art,
Imagine the effect on the porn industry.
Douglas P. Price
The day is soon upon us where we will have CG pr0n. Maybe they'll even sell pr0n video games. *Imagines Zork-like text-based erotic fiction*
Henrik Wann Jensen also got a technical Oscar earlier this year. This work is actually quite old. See the original Siggraph 2001 paper here.
Don't Panic
Damn, I'm sure I saw it in the cinema earlier today ...
Playboy figured this one out ten years ago.
i won't buy games until it comes out on Duke Nukem
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Anyone's who's stuck a flashlight in their mouth could have told you that skin doesn't just reflect light...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Do you have any idea how many infants had to be skinned to get that shader just right?
"...Any chance this can be included in DOOM3? ..."
What isn't going to be included in DOOM3?
Just in case anyone's wondering what that magical technique is: It's called subsurface scattering and simulates the light flow within materials, not just on the surface.
How is this any different than sub-surface scattering? I know there are a few lightwave plugins out there that can do this. Something I googled
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
A couple of posts, as well as the original post allude to the potential use of this technology to the pornography industry. While I realize that it is a multibillion dollar industry, and could certainly afford to utilize high end CG, I wonder how the cost-benifit ratio would work out. After all, paying engineers is obviosly more costly than paying hores.
-
Was I the only one who on reading the article title thought - great at last a chance to replace my pox marked old exterior?
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504/ati-x 800-04.html
It's gonna make everything look that much sweeter...
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
finally the computers are catching up with the dildo industry
So John Carmack are you listening? Any chance this can be included in DOOM3? Of course there are endless other opportunities for virtual humans with perfect skin :-)
I'm betting he figured this stuff out on his own, already. His solution is probably even better. I mean...this is John Carmack we're talking about. Does anyone ever really figure stuff out before he does?
He made Gollum, and he's only an assistant professor? Give the man an endowment, lots of research funds, and the "Coolest Computer Person EV4R" award.
Do they have a nobel prize for computerized skin?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
What software implements this algorithm?
I'm sorry but anyone who thinks Gollum has perfect skin needs a date with a jar of Oil of Olay.
Any chance this can be included in DOOM3?
You're absolutely right - expectations of today's games are getting completely insane.
Didja see the new lens-flare algorithms? They're 16% more realistic than anything ever seen before. (Requirements: Dual P4, 300 gigs available on HD, 2 gigs RAM, etc...)
Whoop-de-doo. Good games don't need stuff like this, and that's something that I'm afraid the game industry is losing sight of. As games get more expensive and cost-intensive to produce, are we headed for another video game industry crash like in the early 80s? The answer, of course, is a definite maybe.
I would demand a $699 fee, as you obviously have prior art.
Oh yeah... almost forgot... videos of the hotness:
http://www.hardwired.hu/index.hw?a=1
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
Tecmo is almost there now for Microsoft's XBox.
Is this something we can expect to see in OSS anytime soon, or is there some kind of patent/copyright restriction? I would be thrilled if this feature showed up in Yafray or Blender...
Oops... links from ATI site MUCH faster:
s s-Demo-v1.0.mov
e -Demo-v1.0.mov
http://www2.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-X800-DoubleCro
http://www2.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-X800-Subsurfac
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
The technology is already available for games, check out the subsurface scattering demo from ATI: http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/rx800.html
Huh? Where's the news? Dr Henrik Jensen discovers years of research on BRDFs?
..as I will already know what Sex my robot is!
Wow, the kiddies will be able to download Pre set Studio Max, or lightwave files with finnished wireframe movies and then all the have to do is hit RENDER. It's like the EasyBake oven for porn!
Sign me up for the next distributed computing craze: pr0n@home!
Tomorrow, we'll be raising a generation of people who believe that all those seemingly real people on the Internet are flawless as well.
How disappointed they will all be when they realize that the imperfection of humanity can't compare with the perfection of a digital world. Hopefully they'll also realize that it is those same imperfections that make life interesting.
...then this article would be entitled "Perfect Dugutal Skun"
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
In real life people dont have perfect skin. Surely we are really after the look of imperfect skin.
...
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Doom 3 will need realisitic blood and guts rendering as much as it needs realistic skin rendering.
ABEMP
Once digital 'filmmakers' have modeled say ~200 or so persons, and say, 50 different scripts, then making 'movies' will simply require running through all the combinations. (200 choose 50?)
In a related prediction, Usenet bandwidth usage will drop 99.999% as people simply download the above material and run the scripts for themselves.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Not all movies are dependent solely on CG for their baddies and their special effects. Physical models can still look goddamn remarkable.
This is also mentioned in his book, (2001), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in raytracing. It's short and about as easy to understand as photon mapping could possibly be.
He has a lot of stuff on his webpage, too, including videos of computer-generated smoke, light through translucent materials, and a good global illumination demo.
For a simpler explaination of what this is all about, there's a photon mapping entry at wikipedia.
-jim
There have been cases of AIDS in people who work in porn. If effective skin was developed for CG movies, this would make it a lot safer for people working in this billion-dollar business.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I don't think "perfect skin" means what you think it means. Unless you think Smeagol has a lovely complexion.
By the way: ew.
Come on! Does anyone thing that face picture on the BBC web site actually looks realistic?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
He also hopes that in the future it will be more widely used in architectural design and art restoration to make virtual buildings leap out of the computer screen.
Writer: Did you read that computer graphics piece?
Editor: Hrmph.
Writer: Is it going in?
Editor: Does it mention things leaping out of the computer screen?
Writer: No, it's about a rendering technique.
Editor: The style book says, and I quote, "All stories refering to 3D computer graphics must include the phrase 'leaping out of the screen'"
Writer: I guess I could tack it on at the end. It really wouldn't make sense though.
Editor: No one will notice.
When you see '1777' and start drooling because of open access permissions :P
When this tech finally gets into the handicam budget used by the porn industry, we'll probably know it by the fact that the guy's dick is 14 feet long and rock hard and the girl's bust is a 44 quintuple Q. This is what is known in the porn industry as "creativity."
Too early in the morning
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Can you tell if this is a real face or generated by a computer?
Yes - it's artificial. Now, I can't tell you exactly what clues me off, but I'm about 95% certain that the face in the article is computer generated. We are not at the point where computers can even semi-reliably fool us on human facial expressions. Given that a good percentage of our brain is dedicated to visual processing it's going to take a while longer. I predict at least 10 years untill we have "Turing-proof" facial animation.
Now if only they could get the physical texture right.
http://www.realdoll.com/
WURD!!
now, all we need to do is perfect eyelash rendering technology. then the star wars movies will finally cease to suck.
To conceal my very real acne... :(
Agreed.
The only game I play online - Quake Mega Team Fortress (the original, not Q3). I have tried some others, but I keep going back to what I think is the best. No, the graphics aren't close to what newer games have, but what it does have is gameplay. There are so many cool maps that alter the purpose of the game (capture the flag, fragfest, multiple teams, retain the flag, maintain control of certain areas, etc) There are several cool mods to the game that add weapons, capabilitites, etc. You don't need a massive machine to run a server or a client.
The downside is that there are fewer and fewer servers out there. People have pretty much abandoned it for prettier games.
Jeez, who ever thought that someone could sound like an old fogey when talking about video games? I guess I am getting old, I used to walk 2 miles uphill in the snow just to play Pac-Man.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
> the soon-to-be-released van Helsing movie.
Not out in the states yet?
If you ever needed an argument that perfectly rendered skin can't rescue an amazingly crap film, Van Helsing will give it to you.
It is so amazingly bad that you end up cringing for the actors forced to deliver such bad performances. Yes, its worse that Episode I, dare I say it, that the even numbered StarTrek movies.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I'd make a virtual pr0n0 of Dick Cheney banging Condi Rice in front of a senate commission. It'd be a sort of voyeur/government porno. At the end, the senators would all piss on a jizz-covered cheney. Then the screen would go black and there would be the cursive words in big white letters: Propz to Halliburton
We are VERY interested in learning more about this digital skin.
Sincerely,
Bryan Adams & Seal
Subsurface scattering is quite old - I learned about it in my graphics classes, and I've been out of school since 1996... here's a 1993 paper on it.
He points out on his web page "Photon mapping is quite good at simulating subsurface scattering, but it becomes costly for highly scattering materials such as milk and skin. For these materials it is better to use a diffusion approximation. The diffusion approximation is much faster than tracing individual photons, and it is simple enough that a BSSRDF can be formulated."
Here's a BSSRDF from a google search.
Engineering something to be 'perfect' in some cases can be pretty easy.
Getting something with believable 'human' imperfections often turns out to be pretty hard...
However, I have yet to see really, really realistic hair on human-type CG actors. Eyebrows are usually thick and static, eyelashes either suffer from the same symptoms or are hardly noticable, there is little to no dynamic body hair, and the hair on the CG's heads don't seem to flow or react to the environment as you'd expect it to. Final Fantasy: TSW came pretty close with the head-hair issues, but even there it was still either too fluid or too clumpy instead of strandy.
I understand that rendering each individual hair with the physics of the environmental interactions would take countless generations for some movies like Final Fantasy, but I want to believe there is a happier medium between this and helmet-head than what we have today.
/*No comment*/ #No comment
Now they can produce porn movies with all those postures which are impossible for anyone less than a Level 25 Supreme Yogi!
Roll your 500-sided die for a saving throw against leg-entrapment.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I honestly don't really think I want to play games where you can't tell the characters from the ones in real life. I'm currently playing through Call of Duty again and if all of the soldiers I killed looked exactly like real people dying I don't think I could actually do it. There is something to be said for being able to experience things more realistically, but I just don't think it would be fun anymore. The reason why games don't lead to violence in real life imho is because its easy to clearly differentiate between life and a video game. Well what happens in 5 years when you literally cannot tell the difference between the two?
As a gamer for over 20 years now I've always enjoyed seeing the graphics get better and better but I wonder if it will someday go too far and make games less enjoyable?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Let's focus on Tomb Raider!
Lara is just begging for this technology!
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The skins looks pretty good but CG lighting is still way to harsh. A CG characters look like a spot light is pointed at them. For darker scenes they just chnage the color of the light making it look like a purple spot light is pointed at the character. Stop working on surfaces and give me a good ambient lighting model.
Sissy.
It's funny how the phrase "perfect skin" means exact opposites depending on if you are talking about real human beings or digital virtual human beings.
I mean on a real person "perfect skin" means no imperfections, on a digital person "perfect skin" means skin with blemishes and realistic imperfections.
I dunno... just saying is all...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
New Jar Jar Binks! Same suckitude, new realistic skin!
Thing is, as the graphics get better, so do our abilities to discern between them and real life. When I first saw the old man from the Final Fantasy movie I couldn't have told you it was fake; however, I could say the same thing about the first Tekken PS2 showcase. Now, both are easy for me to tell from real life.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
How many real people have perfect skin? When they can recreate the sallowness of an alcoholic, the dryness of someone with allergies in spring, the haggardness of someone who's been up all night... that will be realism, perfection is an illusion and people will see right through it in the end... we'll just be so impressed in the meanwhile that it will give the developers a few more years to get it right.
Even surgery and bio-chemistry can't produce perfect skin for people... they still need makeup and air-brushing... when did that become realistic anyways?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Will celebrities sue companies that create CG porn with their likenessess?
This should be cool. They could make a sequel to the paris hilton tape.
You see they are going to add Duke Nuken Forever to Emacs first. Then they are going to add Emacs to DOOM3.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Damn, I think it's time for the weekend to start. I read that subject as "ATARI 800XL" and was like "wtf?"
sudo eat my shorts
You seem to be missing something, but I'm not quite sure.
They mean perfect skin...as in...a perfect approximation of the various visual properties seen in any type of skin...bet the sallowness of an alcoholic, the dryness of...blah blah blah.
You were ok until you said this:
The reason why games don't lead to violence in real life imho is because its easy to clearly differentiate between life and a video game.
Then, suddenly, I found myself checking to make sure your nickname wasn't Grossman.
A =! A
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Further, the client can change (aspects of) the flick to his taste :)
As things get closer to realistic, the response to it suddenly goes very negative. This is called the Uncanny Valley. It is a concern for robot designers as well as Hollywood and other storytellers.
"this would make it a lot safer for people working in this billion-dollar business."
Umm... yes since they would have NO JOBS!
BTW, literally "perfect" skin would mostly resemble Campbell's Cream of Bean soup.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
I disagree. If you can't tell the difference between a picture on a screen vs. someone in real life, then there's something wrong with you.
Yours is the same argument the politians have used on the gaming/movie industry for the longest time. It's pure BS.
eTrade SUCKS
...of subsurface scattering you'll recognize the look. Everything gets this characteristic translucent look that's quite different from how real skin (apart from maybe a baby's) looks. When I see that picture I think "subsurface scattering" not "real woman" :-)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Yes, and they will start as soon as teh IP is secure, and the lawyers have gutted the artistic merit sufficiently to sell on the mass market.
Anyone know of a raytracer that correctly reproduces the double-slit experiment? :)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
No, but there is one that models the effects of relativity.
-jim
Soon we will be watching movies in which all of the actors have perfect skin and bodies.
How does this differ from now? Ahhh, the actors won't be paid.
I agree. When I first saw the burly man scene from the Matrix, I was amazed by realism of the scene.
I saw it for the second time this week on broadcast television and was annoyed that it was so noticably CG.
Sounds good. Can I get this for my Inflateable Mateable?
Though I don't want to go as far with it as this guy!
I saw that same photo in a national geogrpahic magazine about how far from perfect skin we are from almost a year ago (and they seemed to indicate that it was obvious that it wasn't human skin which is in contrast to what the bbc implies).
The Television Wiki
Perfect skin is nice at all but it is very unrealistic skin. That is why computer generated characters still fail the reality test to the eye .. or at least one reason. Any natural thing is somewhat imperfect and not quite asymmetrical for instance take the left half of a face and mirror it in a graphics program so it is perfectly symmetrical. it looks ...odd.. You may not be able to quite put your finger on it ( if it's well done ) but it doesn't look real.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Ah, but most engineers are undersexed. Therefore, hire the "actress" to be in the scene, hire an engineer to do the CG, and pay the engineer with a cameo.
heh
Granted, it was a rather cheesy storyline...
But I wonder how much improvement it would make if the Final Fantasy movie was re-rendered with this added algorithm?
because, at some point, somebody is going to make a 1st-person-shooter with absolutely realistic looking victims.
How long until it goes from subdermal photon scattering to absolutely realistic effects (of gibs flying off a body in the process of becoming a corpse.)
We'll be able to make shots from a bullet's point of view as it pierces and rends.
Will this enure us to the real thing?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Let them do a perfect model the the goatse man's arse!
I really hope there is a law to prevent the creation of CG kiddy porn. Sure, no one is actually be exploited. But it is a moral issue that can rip into the fabric of human decency in future societal foundations.
Life is not for the lazy.
If you can't tell the difference between a picture on a screen vs. someone in real life, then there's something wrong with you.
Behold! the future!
Granted, I agree that it's mostly BS. but I have a chilling feeling that some day, somewhere, the difference between computer-game and reality is going to get really blurry. Compare pac man and pong with UT2004 for some sort of an example.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
No, Gonzo like Gonzo journalism.
I'm not convinced by the eyebrows, at all. The skin is damned good though.
;-)
You must be joking. Unless by "artsy" you meant "accepting of rape", of course.
True story.
Not saying you don't have a point, but it's pretty easy to tell something's fake when you use a mouse to orient your head and your field of view is constrained to a light-emitting box sitting a few feet in front of your face.
I mean, we've already got text documents on our screens that look completely realistic (black text on white background), but it's clearly not real.
True story.
This wont get into Doom III. At least not in 1.0, and I dont expect in any future versions.
Carmack has several times stated that Doom III specs- and technology-wise is finished. Now they just need to find all the bugs, tweak it, optimize it, and make sure MS gets 50% of all the money it produces...
If I understood you right. You say that you wouldn't want to see real-looking people die in a game that is supposed to be fun, for two reasons:
- It would be too disgusting to see all the gory details.
- Some would not be able to make the difference between fiction and real life and possibly mess it up.
For the first concern, lets look at the current movies. Todays movie-technology is perfectly suited to immerse people into a gory blood-fest. Some movies are good and can thus bring an interessting point of view on a subject (Apocalyps now, The Shining). Some don't. But most time mainstream film-makers don't touch this kind of genre... it's difficult to handle right and most people are not interested anyways. I guess it might be similar with gory real-looking games.
Your second concern is reality vs. fiction. I've got around 20 years of gaming on my back myself. I guess there is a distinction to be made among players... kids and grown-ups. Kids can be so totaly immersed that they can have a difficult time to snap back again into real life. This can be particularly difficult when kids take refugie in games because of social exclusion. Grown-ups don't have such problems. As soon as grown-ups sit down in front of a monitor, they know it is going to be virtual. The immersion can happen, but only for a short period of time. Afterwards you they remember that they killed a million *virtual* soldiers.
The quality of the graphics doesn't really matter in the second case. They just don't have to imagine so many stuff like with the old games.
Yes, I think I saw one in the second universe on the left.
The animated girl was done differently. They employed a similar technique to what was used in the Matrix. First a hard shadow is computed and then blurred. This gives a similar impression, but does not allow light to "glow" through an object.
There are actually quite a few other approximate interactive techniques for subsurface scattering, see for example the book "GPU Gems" by NVIDIA, or see here.
You're both right. As a psychologist I've studied this - we have no instinctive ability to tell the difference between reality/imagination (think about dreaming). There are different clues which we learn to rely on, your "screen" and his lack of photo quality are 2.
In combat (real or computerised), such inhibitions are going to be reduced. In much the same way that some soldiers still suffer from flashbacks of war, not everyone is going to leave behind the game reality so cleanly.
Another reason to control access to guns...
Parent should be modded Insightful, grandparent should be modded Troll.
And just for the record, Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson, Jenna Haze, Brianna Banks, Peter North, Sydney Moon, Aria Giovanni, Asia Carrera, Sylvia Saint, Chasey Lain, Devon, Gauge, Kyla Cole, Miko Lee......I could go on all day. I watch porn. Masturbation is good for my prostate. That doesn't mean I'm incapable of loving someone very intimately. I have, and probably will in the future.
I watch television. I know probably more than I need to about the "fabulous lives" of celebrities and popular music. But I also read a shitload of books. My library card has seen better days.
I download music illegally (GASP!). But I also buy used CD's. I also go to concerts all the time (mostly independent bands), where the artists I like actually get most of their money from.
So, (this is to the grandparent), shut the fuck up, and get off your high horse.
I belong to the ______ generation.
. . . we'll be looking at Gollum and these CGI special effects like we do now with stop motion from Clash of the Titans and Sinbad. Nostalgically cool, but obviously and completely unrealistic. I guess if anything, Sinbad and Clash of the Titans shows us that Hollywood's fascination with technology is not a new one. CGI is little different from stop motion in terms of realism, and it will only look real until your 7 year old kid, who is a baby now, watches LOTR and keeps commenting how fake it look. Then you'll look at it, and wonder why you never noticed it before.
And just where am I supposed to take off to, huh?
. . . the Great White North?
(It's the beauty way to go)
Just copy and paste the face of your favorite celebrity onto one of the new skin bodies. Then copy and paste your face or someone else's face onto another body. Create a script on body positions and advanced animation and then create a video out of it and share it on a P2P network.
:)
Imagine, Bea Arthur and Gary Coleman, or George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, or Paul Ruben and Madona. Tons of scenarios that possibly cannot happen, you can create and share with the rest of the world.
I think I'll vomit now that I see what it can possible be used for.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Would that mean that you now have a TOE? ;)
I thought the super punch shot in matrix3 looked more realistic than this. And I always wonderd why the doom3 screenshots looks so backwards in CG, almost as if render with phong shading.
I don't think saying that the X800 has support for subsurface scatter is exactly justified. There are different ways to implement subsurface scattering phenomena (and they're all approximations).
I think it's more fair to say that the new hardware supports new and efficient ways for specific implementations...
-- debian linux - vim powered
You played games for 20 years and you still are afraid that you will feel remorse or just go kill someone after playing? Bullshit. We've had real[istic] people dying on movie screens for a century and still most people understand that when the film ends, they are back in RL. I am pretty sure you are lying about your "feelings" and I don't give a shit anyway, just like all game developers and all other game players. If you can't handle it, don't play. If there will be many people like you (which I doubt), developers will add a "green blood, plastic skin" options to make you feel better.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I worked with Hanrahan on subsurface scattering back in 1993 (or 1994?)-- he had a SIGGRAPH paper on it back then, with examples of human skin and tree leaves rendered in a certain publicly-available ray tracer. Pat did the hard work on that one. I imagine that was the basis (and inspiration?) for any work he did with Jensen later. He is probably getting (deserved) credit for that work, not just "being head of graphics at Stanford" or signing his name on papers as you imply.
It's sort of odd to find that this tech took 10 years to make it mainstream actually. Ah well, it's not easy work.
No clue why Levoy wasn't mentioned. That's a decent question. But I don't really follow this field nowdays.
Yeah, when I read the title I began wondering: "Does this mean Dr. Frankenstein can give his creation perfect fingers?"