Thursday, March 31, 2016

Digital Humans: Crossing the Uncanny Valley in Unreal Engine 4 - GDC 2016


Take your time and go through this video! Some clever techniques here for ‪#‎mocap‬ facial animation. Looks like it's time to stick my gopro on a head mount to do some perfomance capture and cross the uncanny valley (hehe)... As for the rig here since it is optimised and needs to be driven real-time in UE4, is fairly based on blendshapes and joints. The details come from the wrinkle maps and shading networks. I like the idea how they are using stereo camera to capture the facial performance in pseudo 3D, this helps in realistic facial animation! And yeah the blood flow gives added realism, but looks like they missed the skin pores and dynamics! Bottom line is 3D facial scans (Blendshapes based on FACS + Multiple combination shapes) + Stereo facial performance capture + Texture Analysis + Dynamic Facial Shading + Realtime Rig Logic system to sync between Maya and UE4 ...