Realisticlooking skin isn’t all that different from realisticlooking skim milk.

In the above video, Vox’s Phil Edwards looks at why realistic CGI skin is so hard for visual effects artists to master. Weta Digital’s Nick Epstein and Luxion’s Henrik Wann Jensen serve as guides to the parameters that separate realisticlooking skin from the waxy, fakelooking CGI of the past: albedo, displacements, subsurface scattering, and dynamic changes.

There’s been extraordinary progress from the cuttingedge CGI characters in 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within to 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel. This video shows a bit about how that happened.

Jensen’s website has links to most of his key papers: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/

Weta’s Alita site is here: https://www.wetafx.co.nz/films/filmog...

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