Creating Digital Humans
What Do I Mean by "Digital Humans"
A little background on what digital humans or digital doubles are.
In the VFX world Digital doubles are used to replace actors in scenes which would be impossible or very dangerous for the real actor to be in. Sometimes the face is replaced on a stunt double or the entire shot is just a CG character.
Examples of this are in almost every movie shot today, especially the super hero blockbuster movies.
A great Example is in the movie Logan.
Examples of Digital Replacement in "Logan"
In the above video Hugh Jackman was scanned in a device called the light stage developed at USC Institute for Creative Technologies by Paul Debevec. The Device uses several high speed photography cameras and LED light panels that capture every angle of an actor to then create a representation of them in 3D.
It's a complicated process that takes many steps to prefect the character but when its done you have a very realistic 3D Avatar.
Learning the process.
So a few years ago while I was working at a small production company in Toronto I met a couple of guys who where starting to build a very simplified version of this rig, they didn't have all the bells and whistles but it intrigued me and it wasn't long before I left my job to join their team. Since then I've learned the process of taking scans to completion and then creating Digital Humans that can be used in Movies and Video games, and what I want to do from here is
share what I've learned with the community.
I want to write posts about the entire workflow including
*Scanning (Blendshapes for Animation)
*Texture Creation using photography
*Sculpting and Cleanup
*Motion Capture
*Getting Characters to work in Unreal Game Engine
I look forward to sharing my knowledge with those who find this interesting.
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