Accurate human rendering in game [2014-2016]

I still can't believe this is done in Unreal 3...

 

Can Batman turn his head with that suit? It was very funny that the movie version of that suit did not enable the actor to turn his head and his movements while fighting looked awkward

 

Yup, that's Michel Keaton's suit from 1989 film.

 

Until Dawn, well, I was thinking about commenting on the somewhat artificial look of the characters, but after seeing these images I have to correct myself. It's mostly the girls that look unnaturally smooth, but the rest of the characters are really outstanding and some of the facial animations in those gifs are really really well done. So I guess they've tried to emulate the look of heavy make-up; and maybe even had some serious comments from the agents of certain talent that resulted in this look. Pretty good job overall; it'll be hard to tell now which game does CG humans best.

 

Two more shots from main characters:



And the respective actors: Galadriel Stineman and Brett Dalton

 

you could tell me that guy's pic is from uncharted 4 and i would believe you.

 

Mike from Until Dawn reminded me a lot of a younger Drake.

 

Mike has by far the most convincing model in the game with the best looking facial animations.
A lot of other characters, especially Ashley have weird mouth movements while talking, it becomes quite swollen looking.

 

Hayden Panettiere's (Sam) model:

 

They even got the liquid in the eyes very well done. You can almost sense the extra layer of water on the eye ball. Nice.
I am not sure how many other games got that right.
Also is it me or does light get through the iris?

 

I need to see another shot with a different camera angle, but their eye shader seem to account for iris getting lit on the opposite angle from the light. Fantastic. (They could hack it with an "inwards" iris model (which is not anatomically correct) but it would look weird at certain angles.

 

If there's any such effect, it's quite subtle. As far as I know it's about the way light is refracted through the lens, so if it's there it has to be a hack (raytracing would be too expensive for now).

 

Oh the effect is there, but indeed it's done through the inwards iris "hack", it turns out.
Here's the one from the side and a real eye. Though I must say this effect doesn't fire my uncanny valley detectors at all.

 

You can pre-compute the irradiance incident on the iris in such a way that you take into account refraction of light as it passes through the cornea, as well as sub-surface scattering that occurs in the iris. In order to reduce the dimensionality enough to fit the result in a 3D texture you need to assume that the eye geometry is radially symmetrical, which isn't really a poor assumption. However it does mean that can't account for occlusion/bounce from the eyelids, so you have to account for that separately. We did this for The Order, following the research that Jorge Jimenez presented at SIGGRAPH 2012. I don't know if Until Dawn is doing the same thing (or even something better), but it's certainly possible considering their major focus on character rendering.

 

Same model from different angles:

 

Looks sweet, it doesn't look off at all.. But it does have the inward iris model, maybe with the new shaders you don't need this as much, but here's what I'm talking about:

The pupil hole does not normally touch the iris even from the side, its shape, along with the iris itself, is refracted by the cornea. Ray tracing may be the only way to correctly distort it I guess (talking about the shape, not the lighting properties). I can't believe we're talking about these for realtime renders, though.

 

Yeah, i was taken by surprise by how good the models look in this game, this is Peter Stormare's model:

 

I think in many games the rendering model are good. The illusion break with facial animation and I think the best facial animation are done by Naughty Dog but many other are pretty good. I played only one game on PS4 with very bad facials animation Killzone Shadow Fall...

 

Urgh, I really hope PNGs will quickly come to everyone. PS4 JPGS really don't like dark games. So much detail is lost.

 

I think after playing through UD many times i've changed my original opinion on its facial animations. I think they look great for the most part with only a few parts looking off (especially during the first chapters). I hope the guys at SuperMassive get to work on projects like these from now on, UD is fantastic.