New facial animation technology with Speech Graphics and SSSS

       Last week was very exciting regarding some new technological advancements in games art and in 3D  area overall, that I decided to write a wrap up of my favorites ones. 

       Jorge Jimenez, a real-time graphics programmer, has released a mind-blowing video that showcases the latest and final advances on real-time skin rendering (Separable Subsurface Scattering), which enable to quickly render skin in just two post-processing passes. What's really important here is that everything you are about to see is written from scratch using DirectX 10 and rendered in real-time, from the skin to the film grain.

With a powerful GPU you can try it out yourselves:  download the original demo.

•  For example, on GeForce GTX 580 demo runs approximately 112 fps, thus the technology could be used in games nowadays.

Further plans of development team are realistic fur and hair in real-time environments. Before Separable Subsurface Scattering team worked on SMAA antialiasingu  and MLAA applications. For more information, visit www.iryoku.com .

Speech Graphics

       U.K.-based Speech Graphics company wants to revolutionize audio-driven animation through new software that uniquely predicts how the muscles of the human face move to produce sounds.

The new lip synching technology uses just audio input to automatically make a 3D character speak. Since it uses a universal physics model, the company says it will work across all languages, saving game development time and resources.
 

       Team from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics and the Centre for Speech Technology Research, Speech Graphics co-founders Michael Berger and Dr. Gregor Hofer have a combined 20 years of experience in speech technology and animation. They say they created their new software in response to the rising quantity and cost of spoken dialogue in today’s story-driven video games, such as BioWare’s recently MMOPRG Star Wars: The Old Republic (SW:TOR). SW:TOR, which contains 260,000 lines of voiced dialogue in three languages, reportedly cost nearly $200 million to develop.