Projects

Valentina 4D

This ‘Valentina 4D Demo’ breakdown utilizes a 4D scan test conducted in partnership between Pixel Light Effects & Reblika. Here, the facial performance was captured in ‘4D’ in much the same way as 3D facial blendshapes are captured. It is effectively 3D scanning over time; each frame is an OBJ model with textures.

One of the biggest challenges with 4D capture, according to the team behind this demo. It is that eyes and lips can become deformed and projected incorrectly. Reblika came up a solution for this to relax the entire face and project additional details on top. Correction of eyelids was done in two passes.

Minimal rigging was done. Since the scan does not come with eyes and teeth data, Reblika did parent constraining and used the 4D data to drive the lower teeth movement. Once the jaw was positioned correctly, everything was able to follow.

Additional tongue animation was also created by Reblika to fill in the void. By studying the original raw sequence in color, Reblika discovered that the lips were almost never fully closed. In order to make them deform more naturally, Reblika created correctives to simulate the sticky lips. However, real-life lips stick to each other depending on the amount of saliva and how much it compresses.

Reblika sculpted additional secondary details around the eyes and lips to capture Valentina’s likeness. Tertiary maps were layered from Texturing.xyz to finalize the lookdev in Maya using Arnold.

Before & After Step by Step guide