The Digital Emily project

This course describes how high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation were combined to create Digital Emily, a believably photorealistic digital actor. Actress Emily O'Brien was scanned in the USC ICT light stage in 35 different facial poses using a new high-resolution face-scanning process capable of capturing geometry and textures down to the level of skin pores and fine wrinkles. These scans were assembled into a rigged digital character, which could then be driven by Image Metrics video-based facial animation technology. The real Emily was captured speaking on a small set, and her movements were used to drive a complete digital face replacement of her character, including its diffuse, specular, and animated displacement maps. HDRI lighting reconstruction techniques were used to reproduce the lighting on her original performance. The most recent results show new real-time animation and rendering research for the Digital Emily character.