Clear Angle Studios, the foremost 3D capture and processing provider to the film and TV industries, alongside DI4D, the premier independent facial capture and animation provider, and TexturingXYZ, the industry leader in high-resolution skin texture maps and advanced skin processing, today demonstrated their vision for a new standard of performance-driven digital human faces at SIGGRAPH 2024.
The three companies are revealing this groundbreaking 4D facial performance capture service, which for the first time produces per-frame map data to deliver a final product that is almost indistinguishable from recorded footage of a human.
The video, which shows the building process from the initial mesh to final render, offers a glimpse into the future of interactive entertainment and what this collaborative capability from all three specialist companies could offer vendors in one single-service. Clear Angle Studios provides the sophisticated capture technologies, DI4D provides second-to-none markerless mesh tracking, and TexturingXYZ enhances the micro skin details on the maps using their advanced Hyperskin technology.
3D scanning produces an accurate digital model of a static, real-life subject. However, even when using a 3D scan, recreating an actor's movements in a digital human has previously relied on the interpretation of an animator. 4D capture records scans in motion, allowing a photo-realistic digital replication of the actor's performance that captures all the subtlety and nuances only a real human can produce.
Clear Angle Studios, DI4D and TexturingXYZ have undertaken the task of accurately displaying the subtleties of the hyperfine changes that the human face undergoes within the changing of expressions. Every pore and micro skin detail stretches, contracts, flexes, and flows in a specific way when differing facial poses are pulled. This causes visible distortions, and changes to the way that light falls across the skin. When animating a static frame of skin detail from a single 3D scan across a sequence, a lot of this detail is lost or assumed. As can be seen in the video, however, this new collaborative 4D process produces a faithful representation of these real world shifts happening dynamically per frame. Not only is the detailing of the micro skin texture map accurate across the geometry, but the light reflections seen in the renders are also highly accurate and representative of those micro detailing shifts.
