Digital actors that periodically appear on the big screens, as well as in numerous video games, still leave a lot to be desired in terms of visual plausibility. Of course, the reason for that is the imperfection of existing image and capture technologies, as well as features of the human psyche, which unmistakably distinguishes a living person from his “digital copies” (the effect of “sinister valley”). Company Epic Games, the exhibition Game Developers Conference introduced a new generation of digitization technology actors developed by its professionals.
Of course, the digitized 3D models of the actors are rendered in real-time by the graphics Engine Unreal Engine. The developers call a new technology known as “digital people next generation.” In creating this technique of digitizing the actors also took part of the company 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon. As a first demonstration, the audience was shown a video titled “Siren”. For it was digitized appearance of Chinese actress bin Jiang (Jiang Bingjie), but all the movements and facial expressions of the resulting 3D model was played by another actress in a special motion capture Studio. We offer you to look at the final video, and to watch a short film about the creation of the video.
Following the “Siren” viewers showed a couple of videos. This time a digital copy of the famous actor Andy Serkis, who performed many roles in Hollywood films. Basically, the actor plays a variety of CGI characters, giving them their voice, facial expressions and movement. For example, he played the role of Gollum in “the Lord of the rings”, then he played a giant APE king Kong in a modern remake of the famous movie. Andy is so convincingly played the role of the primacy, that he was invited to appear in a series of movies “planet of the apes”, where he got the main role. Recent roles Serkis is possible to note the Supreme leader of Snoke from “Star wars” character and KLO series of blockbuster Marvel superhero.
Below you can see the digitized facial expressions of Andy Serkis, which was superimposed on the face of a fictional 3D character.
After the presentation representatives of Epic Games also showed the audience new technology raytracing in real time, created in collaboration with Microsoft and NVIDIA. This means that the reflection of all rays of light in the frame, their refraction and dispersion computed graphics engine on the go, without the need for lengthy rendering of each individual image. We offer you to look at this demonstration on the example of the funny scenes based on the universe of Star Wars.
Epic Games has unveiled the next generation of technology digitized actors
Sergey Grey