New software adds realistic changes in animated characters’ skin colour

LONDON - Even the animated faces would now look more real, thanks to a new software that adds realistic changes in skin colouring to animated characters.

The colour of our faces depends on the concentration of melanin in the skin, but it also alters with our expressions and emotions because of changes in blood flow.

Drinking, exercising, and going out in hot or cold weather also have an effect.

It takes experienced artists to add such natural variability to animated characters, and even then the results can be imprecise, reports New Scientist.

To automate the process, Tim Weyrich of the University College London and colleagues took images of volunteers’ faces using a device that measures how light is scattered and absorbed by the skin.

They recorded changes in colour as the volunteers made different facial expressions, after they ran up and down nine flights of stairs, and after they drank a pint of beer.

The team then combined all these images into a model of how skin colour changes.

With the resulting software, an animator need only pick out points on their character’s face that correspond to points in the model, such as the corners of the lips, then set the activity or emotion the character is feeling, and watch as the face colour changes automatically.

The work would appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics. (ANI)