Someone wrote a Unity shader to make photorealistic animated faces

I came across this on Twitter: custom Unity shader that makes eyes blink realistically (apparently using a vertex shader effect) and adds things like sweat or water running down the face as well as photorealistic skin etc: https://twitter.com/Sakura_Rabbiter/status/1401925341656981507

It looks to me like it just uses a tiling normal map to get skin detail (fairly repetitive) and a facial texture adapted from a photo and likewise for the eye texture. The main difficulty, I would think, is deforming the vertices of the eyelids to produce a convincing blinking motion (which also includes deformation of the skin under the eye) but I would think that could just be done by having the shader move vertices in an elliptical zone around the eye, after passing the coordinates to the shader.

 

Ok, the eye looks creepy, but otherwise pretty awesome work.

 

That normalmap detail for the skin is also applied on the eyebrow. As always, it can be improved, it's still pretty cool though!

 

She said she used HDRP, but I don't see why this couldn't be done in the normal Unity rendering pipeline. Is there any reason it couldn't ?

 

Wow! That is some amazing work there.

But something about the eye animation looks scary though.

 

I suppose it might have just been because Shadergraph may have been easier for them.

EDIT: There is an eye master graph I believe, so probably helped a bit.

 

Is the eye shader the same that comes with unity ?

 

It seems to me that the eyelid closure was done with blendshape, not with a shader.

 

I hate how "photorealistic" has been redefined to mean "high fidelity" because nothing about the texture, movement, lighting, or anything else is "photorealistic" or even eye realistic.

 

In all honesty, the skin around that eye reminds me of a raw chicken breast that hasn't been cooked yet. Jello-like translucency of the skin is quite similar to that.

 

Good heavens that looks pretty smart indeed! Especially if it is just a shader.

Now we don't think unity has anything like this, although if you look at their latest demo, they have a very sophisticated eye rig to experiement with inside the main character of the heretic demo I believe. Of course metahumans does such a thing out of the box like magic

https://forum.unity.com/threads/my-foray-into-unity.1111525/page-2#post-7249433