Awesome Open Source 3D Human Skin Tech is Awesome
Speaking of possible falls into (or leaps over) the Uncanny Valley, from mesh heads in SL we go to Separable Subsurface Scattering, which is a fancy of saying a new technology for displaying animated 3D human skin at maximum realism -- watch:
Read more about it here. Whichever side of the Valley this lands you, the best thing about is it's open source, and you can download and play with it now. Connie Arida (who sent me the link), puts it this way:
"[A] huge leap in real time animation of ultra realistic 3d human skin. Though the textures are 4000 X 4000 and a 70,000 triangle count, the code is open source and demo are both downloadable and will run at a decent frame rate on my 500 series Nvidea card." Go here to play with it yourself.
If I won the lottery big time, I'd finance SL 3.0 to look like that. Massive avatar immersion!
Posted by: Paola Tauber | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 01:32 PM
Awesome.
Posted by: Nalates Urriah | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 02:25 PM
yikes! too real for this fakey person!
Posted by: Ener Hax | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 02:28 PM
Looks a bit like Peter Bishop from Fringe
Posted by: Metacam Oh | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 04:03 PM
It looks very good however the model seems to be a corpse.
As modeling human figures in games becomes more realistic I think there will be ethical questions regarding the models these skins are based upon.
The people who pose nude for the photo sourcing sites are paid peanuts but their images go on to make mega millions for games. Its about time these models get wise and fight for their image rights.
Posted by: Melponeme_k | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 05:16 PM
Meh, I was waitin fot his eyes to open.
Posted by: Pepys Ponnier | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 06:27 PM
"Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England. . . and his warts"
Just popped into my addled brain as I watched this video.
Posted by: Iggy | Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 06:30 PM
I notice the eyes remain closed throughout, which may be because rendering totally natural looking eyes is harder than rendering realistic skin. Also, the face is perfectly still and only the camera moves about it. What actually creates the uncanny valley effect is the microexpressions that are missing from animation or motion capture, and if this head were made to talk and react I bet the uncanny valley effect would be aparrant. Then again, we are getting damn close to capturing these subtle details with modern mo-cap techniques so I expect totally convincing CG humans are not far off.
Posted by: Extropia DaSilva | Friday, June 15, 2012 at 03:35 AM
I'll have to look into this. Skin is extremely tough to get right because it's not really an opaque surface, but layers of translucent material wrapped around a substructure of veins, muscles, tendons and bone. Looks like they've done a superb job with it.
True, it's the animations that breath life into the skin, but give them detail like this and maybe they'll get inspired :)
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Friday, June 15, 2012 at 06:34 AM
Um, SLU already had a thread about this: http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/science-tech/71117-realistic-human-skin-demo.html?highlight=human+skin
But it is still an awesome demo.
Posted by: Lord | Friday, June 15, 2012 at 08:54 AM
Better graphics than the people actually next to me.
Posted by: Ezra | Friday, June 15, 2012 at 09:33 AM