Fahrenheit Digital

Although I went to bed just after 4AM, I managed to get out of bed at 8:30AM. Yes, I *DID* have an 8:30 course I wanted to attend but would just be a bit late.

This talk was about Facial Animation… and oddly, I don’t remember all that much about it. Must have still been half asleep or the coffee had not yet set in. I had to duck out a little early anyway in order to check out of the hotel and get my boarding pass for the flight home.

But I *DO* remember meeting more friends from other studios for lunch. We walked in the blazing heat and humidity to a local restaurant which, upon arriving there, found that it was packed with fellow conference attendees. Luckily there was another small restaurant across the street that we all went to.

Returned to the convention center and walked through the student projects exhibit at the main entrance of the center. There were several intersting projects, including one in which the students (from Osaka) had figured out a method of calculating volumes of a mesh then segmenting the model and placing joints inside of it. The software he demonstrated to me would automatically bind the mesh and he had a rudimentary animation recording system built in as well.

Such a system could potentially be used to automatically china and bind background characters in large crowd scenes. In a situation where you have hundreds or thousands of characters that will not take up much screen space individually, their software might allow you to handle a large number of characters with relatively ease.

I ran into a number of people that I had “met” online, like Javier Solsano. Never met him in person until that day and he somehow found me in the convention center. But it was great meeting him and the other people I finally got to meet face to face! I hope to meet more people like this and maintain some sort of dialogue with them all.

After that I sat in on some of the Massive and ZBrush demos (luckily their booths were next to each other); both companies had some great stuff to show. The mesh extraction tools in ZBrush 3.5 are great as are the increased resolution handling, ability to paint without UVs and the introduction of layers.

Then I went to the Disney booth to work for a couple of hours. I meandered about answering whatever questions I could and gave a couple of demonstrations of the rigs we build at Disney. Of course I could not go into details but had fun talking with the people there and helping out however I could.

Once my shift was complete I grabbed my luggage and went straight to the airport. The traffic was TERRIBLE, but I gave myself plenty ot time knowing that this would be the case. I was glad that I was leaving Boston a day before the convention ended. I could only imagine what traffic to the airport would be like then!

Met up with a few other Disney coworkers at the airport, we grabbed a quick bit to eat then waited for our flight to board. Once on the runway they announced that the flights were being held on the ground until air traffic control could find new routes in order to avoid a major stormfront.

After about 45 minutes in the air (once we finally got off the ground) we flew past a huge mass of dark clouds just to our north. A massive and impressive lightning storm was present throughout the clouds, lighting up the interior forms with the flashes. We flew for about 30 minutes before we were past this storm; it was enormous and impressive. And there were lights beneath the storm the whole time! Those poor people must have been pounded bby this storm, but it was great to watch from the plane.

Made it back to Los Angeles and that was the end of Siggraph 2006… until next year in San Diego!

Still suffering from jetlag… I force myself to to go bed at around 4AM. Just my luck that every day I have a course that I want to attend that starts at 8:30AM.

Started the day with a half-day course titled “Face to Face.” Started out with a bang; the facial capture & retargeting of “King Kong” was detailed. Initially I had thought that Weta was using a muscle system for Kongs face. Instead they basically used the Andy Serkis facial capture to drive a series large number of well-built blendshapes. But because the human facial musculature is slightly different than that of a gorilla, coupled with a different set of expression that these two species can create, Weta developed a method to retarget the human facial muscles & expressions onto the face of their mythical silverback gorilla.

The retargeting was based on the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. This system breaks down the expressions of the human face into a series of defined muscle movements. Although a similar system exists for chimps, Weta had to create this FACS for their gorilla.

The results were absolutely amazing! The subtelty that they were able to capture and retarget was astounding. Hands down the best performance capture I have ever seen. The fidelity of their capture was so precise that they were even able to reproduce the most subtle eye moves through tracking the smallest corneal bulge during the capture sessions.

Hats off to Weta and a great performance by Andy Serkis!

Other parts of this talk included a presentation by George Burshokov, a former coworker of mine from ESC who now works at Electronic Arts. During the Matrix sequels George was instrumental in developing what was called “Universal Capture,” a way of capturing subtle facial performances as well as incredibly high resolution texture information simultaneously… all without using any markers.

George and others at EA have refined this method so that it works to create realtime facial animation. The data sets are much smaller and he used markers, but the facials expressions they are able to produce for the Tiger Woods game he demo’d were fantastic. Definitely a technology that will add to the realism and fun of the next generation of videogames.

One reason they chose to explore this method over hand keyframing of the faces is the “Uncanny Valley.” A Japanese robotocist, Masahiro Mori, surmised that humans find synthetic reproductions of human likenesses more appealing and experience a higher degree of empathy… up to a point. Once these synthetic humans reach a level very close to “real” in their appearance the degree of human appeal and empathy plummets significantly. Hence, the Uncanny Valley.

So as videogames and motion pictures strive to create realistic humans we are finding ourselves on the cusp of the precipice of this Uncanny Valley. Some would argue that our industry has fallen off the edge a time or two!

George believes that using performance capture to more accurately reproduce the detail and subteleties of the human face seems to be a promising way to climb out of the Valley. His results on the game and during production of the Matrix sequels were phenomenal.

Later, I jumped into a talk on content creation but decided to depart once it was apparent that the topic was not what I had initially expected it to be. So I met up with some friends for lunch, took a nap then woke up in time to go to one of the parties happening that night.

I decided not to go, so I walked out for dinner but the place I wanted to go (Barking Crab) had a long line of people streaming out the door. Went back to my hotel, into the restaurant there and ran into more friends (one great thing about Siggraph is that you get a chance to meet up with your old friends regardless of where in the world they are working). We had a great time!

After dinner I met two men from an animation studio in Tokyo. My wife is from Japan and we visit her country about once a year. I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to visit a few schools and studios while there.

A friend working at this particular studio asked if I would take the time and meet with his coworkers, which I was more than happy to do. I was dreading the fact that my nihongo is terrible, but I figured between my terrible Japanese and their better English we could manage. Well, it turned out to be a fun time and they were both great guys. We spoke at length about the animation industry in Japan and the changes it is going through right now.

Eventually, several of my coworkers from Disney joined us and, since they are all nice folks, we all had a fun time just hanging out and talking.