4K Screenshot Showcase: Nvidia's face tech

Every week, keen screen-grabber Ben Griffin brings you a sumptuous 4K resolution gallery to celebrate PC gaming's prettiest places, or in this case, PC gaming's most detailed face.

Meet Digital Ira. A collaboration between Activision and USC Institute of Creative Technologies, he's their crack at creating a photoreal digital actor,

"To achieve this," the USC ICT write on their blog, "we scanned the actor in thirty high-resolution expressions using the USC ICT's new Light Stage X system and chose eight expressions for the real-time performance rendering. Then we shot multi-view 30fps video of the actor performing improvised lines using the same multi-camera rig." Finally, the mesh animation was transferred to standard bone animation on a 4K polygon mesh using a bone weight and transform solver. Here's what all that looks like at super-high resolution.

Note in particular the screen-space subsurface scattering, translucency, eye refraction and caustics, real-time ambient shadows, and physically-based two-lobe specular reflection with microstructure. If you know what all that means.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.

Download the full-sized image here.