Image Metrics Debuts Emily's Game Face

Image Metrics recently unveiled an aspirational demonstration of hyper-realistic facial animation rendered in real-time. The demo, called “Real-Time Emily”, was debuted in front of a room full of bloggers at the 2009 Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. 

Six months ago, at SIGGRAPH 2008 Image Metrics launched a demonstration of Photo-Real Emily. The demonstration was an unprecedented success and proved that Image Metrics was capable of pushing the boundaries of pre-rendered facial animation. The next step in the evolution of Emily was to prove that that same detail could be achieved for game developers that need to achieve that detail in run-time engines.

In the past, hardware was not powerful enough to render such highly detailed faces due to all the details that need to be processed. With today’s quad-core machines, like AMD’s new “Dragon” system, achieving those goals is now far closer to reality.

In order to bring real-time Emily to life, Image Metrics brought actress Emily O’Brien in to the studio for a capture session where she was filmed with one camera and no special markers or make-up. Image Metrics then analyzed the video using its proprietary software and applied the resulting data to the facial model of Emily. Image Metrics turned to ICT for extremely detailed skin shaders and lighting effects.

Image Metrics unveiled the demo at CES 2009 using the powerful processors of AMD’s new “Dragon” system. The computing power of the system allows multiple instances of the demo, complete with lighting, facial movement, and head movement, to be rendered and played on the fly. The demo simuates what game systems will soon be able to achieve given the right tecnhonology.

As a result, Image Metrics has come very close to creating a real-time Emily that rivals her counterpart in film. With AMD’s computing power, ICT’s skin shaders, and Image Metrics’ facial animation, photo-real characters in video games may not be as far away into the future as we think.