Horde3D

I'm happy that I can finally show a screenshot of my current project which deals with facial rendering and in skin rendering in particular. The character you see here is called Alfred and represents a butler that we will use as a listening agent in a research project.



For the skin rendering I use an advanced texture space diffusion method which is implemented using a sum of Gaussian blurs. Specular highlights are computed with a physically based BRDF model instead of the naive Phong equation that makes all materials look like plastic. Another point of interest is that the image is gamma corrected to make the gradients more natural.

Any comments or criticism is welcome

wow

Congratulation, this is really a great result Is this suitable for real time rendering?

There is a similar technic ive heard about wich is shown in GPU Gem 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zKvWSM_pUrY

Looks great. Looks really great.

Thanks for your nice comments!

The technique used here is basically the same as described in GPU Gems 3 (an seen in the demo video above) although I have not implemented every single trick. About the performance: The demo runs in real-time but it is way too slow to be used in a game. I have abother shader that is very well suited for application in games.

Here is a comparison of the results. The top image shows plain Phong lighting. As you can see everything looks very dry and hard. This comes from the fact that no subsurface scattering is simulated and that the standard "plastic-highlights" are used.

The middle image is my mid-quality shader meant for real world apps. Actually the subsurface scattering approximation is very simple but I think it is looking ok. The shader is also using physically based BRDFs for more natural highlights.

The bottom image finally is the very high quality but slow multi-layered texture space diffusion method described in GPU Gems 3.

Kudos to your modeller/texturer, as that model looks pretty good even with the basic shader.

Yes Bernhard Falk (the artist) is really doing great work. I'm very happy with his model and textures. The amazing thing is that he is not only a talented artist but also has a full graduation in technical computer science.

We still have another great model which I haven't shown yet. It was designed and realized by an artist who has worked for Blue Byte on one of the "The Settlers" games in the past. The rendering techniques we employ try to emphasize the artistic style of his character.