Making Greg

Greg was scanned using our sister companies’ light dome rig, which consists of 70 still cameras and 156 LED lights arranged in a geodesic sphere. The fully polarized rig enables us to capture both polarized and cross-polarized images, as well as customized lighting environments and sequences for look development reference. We captured 81 expressions along with their respective maps.

The scan and textures are processed through A New Design’s pipeline using our custom base mesh, generating over 1000 blendshapes, including corrective, simulated, and region-specific shapes.

Additionally, we have ensured the eye, tear duct, and eye shell geometries fit perfectly into the eye sockets, making them ready for both offline and real-time use.

Diffuse, normal and displacement texture maps are also generated from our pipeline for each of the 81 shapes, which require little to no clean-up. Along with this, we created realistic textures for the eye geometries and teeth.

We crafted a custom groom using Maya's XGen, aiming to closely match the photo reference. These grooms are meticulously designed to be suitable and optimized for real-time use.

We dedicate substantial time to creating realistic materials in the Arnold renderer within Maya for offline rendering. Traditional rendering is renowned for delivering the highest level of photorealism, making it an excellent benchmark for testing the quality of our texture outputs (and for making pretty renders, of course).

After establishing a benchmark in Arnold, we reconstruct the character and materials in Unreal Engine 5, using MetaHuman materials as a foundation. Our goal is to push the quality as close to traditional rendering as possible.

The look-dev process is designed to empower the artist, providing a range of masks and controls that make shader attributes, such as specularity and roughness, easily adjustable for different regions.

The character is rigged with dynamic wrinkle and blood-flow maps integrated. Each of the 81 textures is incorporated into our dynamic skin shader, and with our custom face logic operating in UE5, the face moves dynamically in real-time. This rig functions seamlessly in both Maya and UE5.

The control rig is custom-built to work seamlessly with the MetaHuman Animator, ensuring it is perfectly suited for high-quality animation. This setup allows us to produce detailed animations while showcasing the activation of our extensive dynamic wrinkles and blood flow effects. By integrating these features, we can achieve a level of realism that brings characters to life, capturing subtle nuances and expressions in real-time.