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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Abstract:
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 the use of USC ICT’s light stage technologies for creating realistic digital characters in motion pictures and then describe how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create "Digital Emily", one of the first photorealistic digital actors.
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. 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 was used to match the lighting conditions of her original performance.
The talk will also present our laboratory’s latest autostereoscopic 3D Teleconferencing system, recently demoed at the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference.
About the speaker:
Paul Debevec leads the graphics laboratory at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. His 1996 Ph.D. thesis from UC Berkeley presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of virtual cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie which premiered at the SIGGRAPH 97 Electronic Theater, and its technology formed the basis of the virtual backgrounds in the “bullet time” shots in The Matrix.
Subsequently, Debevec pioneered high dynamic range image-based lighting techniques in his films Rendering with Natural Light (1998), Fiat Lux (1999), and The Parthenon (2004); he also led the design of HDR Shop, the first high dynamic range image editing program. At USC ICT, Debevec has developed of a series of Light Stage devices for recording the appearance and reflectance properties of human faces, used in creating photoreal digital actors in movies such as Spider Man 2 (2004), Superman Returns (2006), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and Avatar (2009) as well as 2008's "Digital Emily" project.
