ENLIGHTEN3D

By Christian Laforte

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a realistic 3D model of yourself or your dream date? This has long been a dream of computer graphics researchers, 3D artists and sex-starved teenagers. This post will explore how new research and applications will soon make this possible and easy for everyone, even people like me who have a hard time modeling a cube.

Building realistic 3D human characters is becoming increasingly easy. While it still takes years of practice and exceptional artistic talent to create a 3D human from scratch, there are now dozens of products out there that will vastly simplify the process:

1. You can buy good looking characters as-is, at places like Daz3D. Using a 3D modeling tool, you can customize these characters to look like anyone of your choosing… assuming you have days to spare and some artistic talent.
   
2. If you’re short for time and you’re primarily concerned in re-creating someone’s face, you can use Face Reconstruction tools. A few of them exist but most don’t produce decent results without significant touch ups.
   
   One exception, Big Stage, is expected to launch soon. (Disclaimer: Big Stage is a client of ours.) Big Stage won’t simply allow you to re-create your own face in 3D in a few minutes… it will enable you to replace the face of a character in your favorite movie by your own! Imagine reliving the excitement of Indiana Jones with your own face instead of Harrison Ford’s.

Still, even the best Face Reconstruction tools have one big problem in common: hair. Everybody has hair so it’s easy to take it for granted… but tens of billions of dollars spent on shampoo, hair replacement creams and implants prove that beautiful hair matters a lot. I would argue that in 3D animation, there are only two things left to recreate humans: beautiful hair and realistic facial feelings. Let’s keep the feelings for another post and focus on what’s next for hair.

According to a new paper authored by some smart graphics researchers, reconstructing hair will soon be as simple as stepping in a Hair Photobooth. Sylvain Paris and his colleagues have invented a new acquisition technique that involves moving lights, projectors, cameras and complex algorithms to produce amazingly realistic hair in 3D.

While their system can automatically produce results that rival the best 3D artists, it remains to be seen how easily it works with more problematic cases like blond hair, long hair or hair animation.

The paper will be published in a few months at the prestigious Siggraph 2008 conference:

Hair Photobooth: Geometric and Photometric Acquisition of Real Hairstyles

Sylvain Paris (Adobe Systems Inc.), Will Chang, Wojciech Jarosz (University of California, San Diego), Oleg Kozhushnyan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Wojciech Matusik (Adobe Systems Inc.), Matthias Zwicker (University of California, San Diego), Frédo Durand (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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