Next Generation Life

Our talk in GDC 2013, Next-Generation Character Rendering, is a few hours away. On it, we will present what represents to us the culmination of many years of work in photorealistic characters.

We will show how each detail is the secret for achieving reality. For us, the challenge goes beyond entertaining; it’s more about creating a medium for better expressing emotions, and reaching the feelings of the players.

We believe this technology brings current generation characters, into next generation life. At 180 fps in a Geforce GTX 680.

The team behind this technology consists on Javier Von Der Pahlen (Director of R&D), Etienne Danvoye (Technical Director), Bernardo Antoniazzi (Techical Art Director), Zbyněk Kysela (Modeler and Texture Artist), Mike Eheler (Programming & Support) and me (Real-Time Graphics R&D).

You have a teaser of the slides here:
Next-Generation-Character-Rendering-Teaser.pptx

The YouTube account of Activision R&D:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ActivisionRnD

The movie:

And some additional images:

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We will show it running in our two-year old laptop, in live. Hope to see you in our talk!

Edit:

• First of all I’d like to credit the Institute for Creative Technologies for the amazing performance capture provided for the animation (http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/digital-ira/). Their new capture technology enable photoreal facial animation performances together with extremely detailed skin features. The full team behind the capture, leaded by Paul Debevec, is the following: Oleg Alexander, Graham Fyffe, Jay Busch, Ryosuke Ichikari, Abhijeet Ghosh, Andrew Jones, Paul Graham, Svetlana Akim, Xueming Yu, Koki Nagano, Borom Tunwattanapong, Valerie Dauphin, Ari Shapiro and Kathleen Haase.
• Lauren head scan (the woman one) was obtained from Infinite-Realities.
• Second, it has been quoted in numerous sources if this was related with the Nvidia FaceWorks presented in GTC. I’d like to clarify that we both use the same performance capture from the ICT, but the animation and render engine is completely different. In other words, same source data but different engine.
• Finally, I’d to clarify that the technology we presented runs in its higher quality preset at 93/74 fps at 720/1080p respectively, in a GeForce GTX 560 TI (a two-year old mid-range GPU).
• Thanks to all the people who showed interest in our reseach, the slides will be available pretty soon online!