Generating procedural skin textures

Facts

Type master project
Place external
Supervisor Michel Westenberg
Student Ron Vanderfeesten
Thesis download
start/end date - 3/2/2015

Abstract

The videogame- and animation industry have a desire to create convincing virtual characters. Convincing virtual characters need convincing skin textures. The current two methods of creating skin textures, namely by scanning a real actor or by drawing them by hand, are both expensive and time consuming.

Our goal is to provide an alternative to these methods. We propose to let the artist indicate roughly how a character should look and then let the computer fill in all the details.

To accomplish this we have created a procedural texture generation method that consists of two phases. First, a biological model (namely biospec) is used to find the settings of the rendering system which best model the visual appearance of skin. The settings found cover all biological relevant variations of skin. In the second step we use models of biological tissues to determine the skin properties at each location on the human face. Using the settings found in the first step these skin properties are then converted into textures.

As a proof of concept, we have made an implementation of the method for the NVidia iRay rendering system, in which we included models of the following biological tissues: baseline skin, cysts, moles, follicles, freckles, lips, and wrinkles. The textures produced with the implementation were applied to a 3d model of the face of a real actor. Then the 3d model was rendered with the render system and the resulting images were compared with photographs taken from the real actor. Based on visual inspection, these images look very similar.

The results of the implementation show that a procedural texture generation method is a viable alternative for the current methods of creating textures for virtual characters. Better tissue models will further improve the results.

assignment/skintextures.txt ยท Last modified: 2015/12/24 10:40 by huub
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