We saw the Digital Ira Nvidia tech demo at the GDC a couple of months ago and Nvidia published an HD video demonstration of Digital Ira running on a Titan graphics card (skip to 8 minutes 40 seconds for that part of the video presentation). I’ve embedded this video below.
Now the ‘Digital Ira’ tech demo application is available for download from Nvidia. Once downloaded, you can interact with Ira, in real-time, to do the following: “...see Ira immersed in three different lighting environments. Adjust his skin rendering to see the effect of sub surface light transmission through his skin. And, see the realism of his facial motion as he stares you down with a myriad of lifelike expresssions.”
Nvidia says this face rendering “gives us a glimpse of the realism we can look forward to in our favourite game characters”. The face was captured from an actor in a “light stage” at the Institute for Creative Technology at USC. No “tricks” such as face markers or special makeup was used.
Download the FaceWorks rendering app here, it’s 309MB, features CUDA and DirectX 11, Nvidia says the supported platform is Windows 7.
Activision’s version of Ira is less demanding on hardware
At the end of March Activision showed off its new face rendering technology which confusingly used Ira’s face but a different rendering method. Rather than using an Nvidia Titan to record the demo, Activision used a PC with a GeForce GTX 680 graphics card installed which could run its HD face demo at 180 fps; a much faster frame rate on lesser hardware than the Nvidia demo.
Motion Capture Egypt
Another recent video demonstrating face rendering technology comes from Motion Capture Egypt (Snappers Systems) who made an impressive video showing its “real-time markerless facial motion capture system in action”. You can see and read more about this company’s developments upon its Facebook page. Take a look at the fun and impressive demonstration video below.
