From Spiderman to Avatar: Achieving Photoreal Digital Actors
Paul Debevec, University of Southern California
Friday, April 1

ABSTRACT
Somewhere between "Final Fantasy" in 2001 and "The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button" in 2008, digital actors crossed the "Uncanny Valley" from looking
strangely synthetic to believably real. This talk describes some of the key
technological advances that have enabled this achievement. For an in-depth
example, the talk describes how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character
rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create "Digital
Emily", a collaboration between our laboratory and Image Metrics. Actress Emily
O'Brien was scanned in Light Stage 5 in 33 facial poses at the resolution of skin
pores and fine wrinkles. These scans were assembled into a rigged face model
driven by Image Metrics' video-based animation software, and the resulting
photoreal facial animation premiered at SIGGRAPH 2008. The talk also presents a 3D
teleconferencing system that uses live facial scanning and an autostereoscopic
display to transmit a person's face in 3D and make eye contact with remote
collaborators, and a new head-mounted facial performance-capture system based on
photometric stereo.


BIOGRAPHY
Paul Debevec is a research associate professor at the University of Southern
California and the associate director of graphics research at USC's Institute for
Creative Technologies. Debevec's Ph.D. thesis (UC Berkeley, 1996) presented
Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal
architectural models from photographs. Using Facade he led the creation of virtual
cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie whose
techniques were used to create virtual backgrounds in The Matrix. Subsequently,
Debevec pioneered high dynamic range image-based lighting techniques in his films
Rendering with Natural Light (1998), Fiat Lux (1999), and The Parthenon (2004); he
also leads the design of HDR Shop, the first high dynamic range image editing
program. At USC ICT, Debevec has led the development of a series of Light Stage
devices for capturing and simulating how objects and people reflect light, used to
create photoreal digital actors in films such as Spider Man 2, Superman Returns,
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Avatar. He received ACM SIGGRAPH's first
Significant New Researcher Award in 2001 and co-authored the 2005 book High
Dynamic Range Imaging; he chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival is
a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, the Visual Effects Society, and
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He recently received a Scientific
and Engineering Academy Award for his work on the Light Stage systems.