This CGI Skin Looks Unbelievably Real! [Video]

From the USC Institute for Creative Technologies:

We present a technique for synthesizing the effects of skin microstructure deformation by anisotropically convolving a highresolution displacement map to match normal distribution changes in measured skin samples. We use a 10-micron resolution scanning technique to measure several in vivo skin samples as they are stretched and compressed in different directions, quantifying how stretching smooths the skin and compression makes it rougher. We tabulate the resulting surface normal distributions, and show that convolving a neutral skin microstructure displacement map with blurring and sharpening filters can mimic normal distribution changes and microstructure deformations. We implement the spatially-varying displacement map filtering on the GPU to interactively render the effects of dynamic microgeometry on animated faces obtained from high-resolution facial scans.

[ICTGraphicsLab]