3D Scan & Skin Shading

Friday, October 15, 2010 | | 1 comment(s)

A new demo is available showing my skin shader. This time with an incredibly detailed 3D scan by Lee Perry-Smith. Make sure to check out his really impressive gallery of 3D scans!



Skin & Scan Webplayer Demo (~30MB, requires Unity browser plug-in)


You can get this model & textures at his website for free:
http://www.ir-ltd.net/blog



Application Download & Video

Friday, May 21, 2010 | | 8 comment(s)

Finally I was able to upload the application, so you all can have a look at it. You can download the standalone application* here for PC and for Mac (about 20MB). Not that a graphics card with supporting ShaderModel 3.0 or greater with 256MB VRAM is required. If you experience any problems running the demo, please feel free to write an email, comment or something!

I also captured a video of the application showing the most important features:


Preparing for FMX

Tuesday, April 27, 2010 | | 0 comment(s)


Finally my diploma thesis is handed in, but no time to relax. At the moment I am preparing a presentation for the FMX in Stuttgart next week. The final application of my diploma project will be presented and I will talk about the methodes used for realtime charactervisualization with focus on skin and hairshading, clothsimulation and dynamic realtimeanimation. Have a look at the FMX program!
Additionally you can try the application yourself, at least I hope so, at the desk of my school "Hochschule Ansbach".


Writing the theoretical part

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 | | 0 comment(s)

First update since October and one more blog to become deserted? I hope not...
I am writing the theoretical part of my diploma thesis now, so there is not much to show here.

I switched to floating point rendering in Unity, which gives some nice results... but I had no time to tweak the shaders and settings. In about a month I will start working again on the project itself.

Some screenshots of my current status:


Video update & comments

Friday, October 23, 2009 | | 0 comment(s)

Hello everybody,

Finally the comments work. At least they should. And I'd really like to hear your opinion about all this stuff. So... leave a comment!
I also added a poll on the right side. :)

And a small update on the project. Here's a preview of the hair shader with a nice anisotropic specular:



I still got some difficulties with the depth-sorting of the hair (you can see some borders of the hair popping up and down). But more on this next week I think.


Dynamic normalmaps for faces

Monday, October 19, 2009 | | 4 comment(s)

[update: included a short demo video]



Normal maps are standard. It's a great and simple technique to simulate three-dimensional surface structure and details on low polygon object.

Often it's enough to have a static texture for that, but sometimes the surface changes in a way that can't be represented by joint moments or blendshapes, for example fine creases in cloth, wrinkles in skin and so on. For these things it would be nice, to have different normal maps which could be blended together at runtime. But how to do that?


Alpha blending for realtime hair

Saturday, October 17, 2009 | | 2 comment(s)

With my project progressing, I finally have to take care about the hair.
All the rendering is based on polygons. But polygon edges are hard lines and hair is highly detailed and irregular. To get nice borders, some kind of transparency is needed. And here I ran into a problem, which I realized is well known, but has no real solution...