Hard at work: A Work in progress by Hyun Gu Lee & Murad Akhter

Project Goal and motivation

Rendering realistic human characters is considered the holy grail of 3D games and computer animation. One of the central challenges in shading 3D characters is the appearance and modeling of healthy-looking, life-like skin due to its sub-surface scattering and translucent, non-homogenius, multi-layered structure. The different layers of skin exhibit a range of reflectance, transmission and absorption properties which need to be accounted for with a specific physical model. On top of this, human skin often has a large clumps of short, thin hairs which greatly increase the geometry complexity of the scene. Our project's goal is to incorporate the enhancements necessary in PBRT to render realistic-looking human skin and hair. For reference we will be emulating the following picture of a studious CS348B student hard at work.
attachment:pat_rocks_small.png

=== Key technical challenges ===

=== Outline of Implementation ===

Hand Modeling

In order to build a realistic thin model we need a surface to bind it to. We are planning on deriving the hand and elbow 3D mesh by editing the CGHuman male model based on the Absolute Character Tools plugin for 3D Studio Max. This should allow us to export the 3D mesh as an OBJ file into Maya where we will pose it, add the shapes for the pen and notebook and probably use Mark Colbert's maya-pbrt plugin to generate the pbrt file to render our scene. Here's what our mesh currently looks like when loaded into Alias Motion Builder

attachment:han.png

Illustrative images showing another hand pose and the effect of pigmentation on skin color, and translucency.

attachment:coffee_mug_small.png
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attachment:light_toned_small.png

References

http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/index.cfm/ID/194044
http://graphics.cs.ucf.edu/mayapbrt/index.php
Hanrahan, P., and Krueger, W. 1993. Reflection from layered surfaces due to subsurface scattering. In Proceedings of the ACM Siggraph 1999, ACM Press / Addision-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, Computer Graphics Proeedings, 164-174.