This demonstration highlights the state of the art in performance capture. All Ira''s motions were acted out in a "light stage" at the Institute for Creative Technology at USC. The team there headed by Dr. Paul Debevec is able to photographically capture facial geometry, surface detail, and lighting information of an actor without any of the traditional tricks of face markers or special makeup.
This light stage data is pulled into NVIDIA''s demo engine, and using FaceWorks rendering technology we witness a realism of human facial rendering never before seen in real time. FaceWorks shading gives Ira lifelike skin, eyes, lips and teeth. Adaptive tessellation keeps the curves of his face perfectly smooth.
Play with this interactive demo to see Ira immersed in three different lighting environments. Adjust his skin rendering to see the effect of sub surface light transmission through his skin. And, see the realism of his facial motion as he stares you down with a myriad of lifelike expresssions.
- Launched with GeForce GTX 670 and above
- Released: 10 May 2013
- Features: CUDA DirectX 11
- Supported Platform(s) (OS): Windows 7
Face Works uses a face and motion capture technology developed at the University of Southern California’s Institute of Creative Technology (ICT). The Light Stage technology is able to capture data to within a tenth of a millimetre using photographic techniques that capture the geometry of an actor’s face as well as the light transmission through human skin and the reflections that come from the oils too. As well as the still images the Light Stage then uses video capturing to grab around thirty different facial expressions from the actor involved. Once all that information is captured it’s then compressed down to a set of meshes that can be used to recreate and animate a digitised version of that face.
Nvidia have worked with the ICT and managed to get this compressed data down from the 32GB it is in its raw form to around 400MB. At that size it is now possible to do the animation in real time and that is exactly what Jen-Hsun Huang has going on behind him on stage in the video below.
The download is 308 MB in size.
