Keynotes
We'll be adding all the information about what to expect from the keynote sessions on Friday 6 November very soon!
Paul Debevec
"Digital Emily": Achieving a Photoreal Digital Actor
Somewhere on the way from 2001's Final Fantasy to 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, digital actors progressed from looking strangely synthetic to believably real. I will overview some of this history and then focus on how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create "Digital Emily", a believably photorealistic digital actor.
Actress Emily O'Brien was scanned in the USC ICT light stage in 35 different facial poses using a new high-resolution face-scanning process capable of capturing geometry and textures down to the level of skin pores and fine wrinkles. These scans were assembled into a rigged facial model, which could then be driven by Image Metrics' video-based animation technology. The real Emily was captured speaking on a small set, and her movements were used to drive a complete digital face replacement of her character, including its diffuse, specular, and animated displacement maps. HDRI lighting reconstruction techniques were used to reproduce the lighting on her original performance.
The talk will also present our laboratory's latest 3D Teleconferencing system which uses real-time face scanning and a three-dimensional display to transmit a life-sized facial performance in real time and 3D with accurate eye contact and occlusion.
