Last October, we checked out a tracking and animation system that creates a realistic computer animated face based on one person’s face and another person’s facial movements. Most of the researchers continued to work on that system, taking it to its logical conclusion. It can now plaster the resulting animation into a video with very convincing results.
Justus Thies, Michael Zollhöfer, Marc Stamminger, Christian Theobalt and Matthias Nießner’s system creates photometric maps of the source and target faces, and uses those maps to quickly and accurately create a hybrid computer-animated face. What takes this hack over the top is that it accounts for the target video’s lighting, such that the CGI face seamlessly blends with the rest of the target video when it’s pasted over the target actor’s real face. The target videos in the demo below are all YouTube streams.
That is cray.
[via Matthias Nießner via Gizmodo]
