Last night we filming another fxguidetv with Paul Debevec. Paul was in town for a Siggraph Asia lecture, which was hugely interesting and completely packed out.

While some of Paul’s talk covered the history of their research, the later part of the talk was on the amazing new research that he and the team are doing on human faces. The work is outstanding and revolves around breaking out the diffuse and specular light reflectance of a real human face. It turns out that you can film someone and separate the face photography into these two key light aspects. In so doing you get a wealth of information that allows you to do amongst other things, highly detailed face scanning/modeling (without lasers or life casts), very fast computer rendered sub surface scattering and even lightwave frequency varying diffusion normal maps (for RGB) – The work was partly shown last year at Siggraph and we will have more about it in next week’s fxguidetv AND in fxphd.com. As well as coverage from Siggraph itself.