YOUR avatar's eyes could soon be the windows to your virtual soul with the development of a new animation technique that creates lifelike eyes in minutes.
To create a more realistic model of the eye, Guillaume Francois from the University of Rennes 1 in France took two identical digital photographs of an eye. From one of the photographs, he used software to remove the effect of the cornea, the transparent layer on top of the iris, on the light entering the eye. The software then used the image of the eye without the cornea to build up a detailed 3D model of the iris, layer-by-layer. To do this, it assumed that lighter parts of the iris correspond to thicker areas of tissue, since more light is scattered by thick tissue.
The effect of the cornea was then reintroduced using information from the untouched photograph. As a finishing touch, the software added the glint caused by light catching the corner of the eye.
The result is a virtual eye with 95 per cent of the iris pigments identical to those in the original photograph. The process takes just a few minutes, so animators can make quick changes to their designs, says Francois.
The virtual eye contains 95 per cent of the pigments found in the original photograph
The technique could also be used to create artificial eyes that more closely mimic someone's healthy eye, says Chuck Hansen, a computer scientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
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Have your say
This Will Make Little Difference
Sat Mar 14 14:55:50 GMT 2009 by Richard Cook
The implication that this will matter for renderings is probably false. More important are how the eyelids and the skin around the eye move, and they haven't quite gotten that right. If that is not in place, who cares if the eyeball shines exactly right?
So It's Just Better Bump Mapping
Sat Mar 14 17:59:49 GMT 2009 by Zabadack
this is just bump mapping and they found the refraction index of the eye.
unless there's more to it than the video is letting on, it's one of the first things you learn how to do with 3ds max
Enter The Gov. . . .
Sat Mar 14 21:32:18 GMT 2009 by TexasCharley
And now all those fancy eye scan devices at the Pentagon become obsolete?
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