SciTech Awards: Scanning Hollywood with Paul Debevec

Creating photo-real digital actors is one of the biggest remaining challenges in feature film visual effects. Digitally rendered faces must achieve a high level of realism in order to cross the “Uncanny Valley” and appear close enough to real people in order to be accepted by the audience. Often, the digital faces must accurately bear a resemblance not just to the real actors, but the characters they are portraying.
Key to so many vfx digital doubles, character performances and high end digital faces in recent films has been the ultra high quality scanning provided by specialist scanning done in a Light Stage. This innovation is being recognised by an Academy Technical Achievement Award ( or Sci Tech Award) being presented to Paul Debevec, Tim Hawkins and Wan-Chun Ma and Yu Xueming.
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