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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
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
Playboy figured this one out ten years ago.
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.
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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/
I'm sorry but anyone who thinks Gollum has perfect skin needs a date with a jar of Oil of Olay.
It's yet to be released in the UK, this country being almost always left a few months behind when it comes to film releases. And this is a BBC article after all.
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.
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
..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.
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.
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."
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
No he didn't make Gollum. Jensen was the main researcher of this new subsurface scattering technique when he was at Stanford (he is now in San Diego). As was mentioned earlier this was published in a SIGGRAPH 2001 paper, so at least the research might date as far back as early 2001, late 2000. Jensen along with Steve Marschner and Pat Hanrahan got a SciTech Academy Award earlier this year for it (though Marc Levoy was omitted).
The original implementation used raytrcing to achieve the effect, to slow for actual production work. Some people from ILM spotted the paper and decided to implement in a way more friendly to production. Originally it was going to be used for Ep. 2, but the research wasn't completed on time. The first time it was applied was for Dobby in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Christophe Hery even presented a Stupid RenderMan Trick using shadow buffers that could be applied to SSS. Around that time Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri left ILM (tough they were involved with this research at ILM) and joined Weta Digital to work on the Two Towers. Consecuently, Hery, McGaugh and Letteri also received a SciTech Academy award this year for finding a way to implement Jensen's SSS in a production environment.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
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.
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?
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