Comment by bd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bd | Hacker News Reader

Author of the demo here. Some background info about origin of the head model (of which my WebGL rendering is just a pale shadow, check following links for really high quality offline renders and also animation capture).

The head model was based on 3D scan using DIY scanning apparatus created by a single very talented person in his spare time - artist Lukáš Hajka:

http://pchiik.tumblr.com/

He documented his process here:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?177615-DIY-Unive...

http://www.cgfeedback.com/cgfeedback/showthread.php?t=3776

At first it was just static model, later on he created a pipeline also for capturing animations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgceFBMYvSU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOV7wvMZFBs

Lukáš deserves most of the praise, the model is just great. Shading I used here is actually pretty simple, I used more complex techniques elsewhere yet the overall results didn't look as good as this model with a simpler technique.

Here are some of my earlier attempts, each using a different technique:

http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_materials_skin...

http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_materials_bump...

http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/forward_materials_skin_...

The page header mentions "filmic tonemapping", I'd love to hear what that entailed in this case - is it a post-render 3D LUT as some games now do? I couldn't see anything from reading the source... I'm really interested in how we perceive quality of colour in CG renders, and how CG in movies which goes through a print film LUT is helped or harmed by the process.

I do tonemapping in a final compositing step of deferred rendering. Here are formulas:

http://filmicgames.com/archives/75

John Hable did a great job proselytizing virtues of linear space lighting and proper tonemapping.

http://filmicgames.com/archives/category/tonemapping

http://filmicgames.com/archives/category/gamma

There have been also SIGGRAPH course if you want to delve-in deeper:

http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-color-course/

Those SIGGRAPH talks, OCIO and Jeremy Selan's http://cinematiccolor.com have been a touchstone a while :) Thank you so much for the filmicgames link, that's exactly what I was curious about.

In return maybe I can offer the Academy's linear-to-display reference rendering transform, which is intended to replace the myriad of tonemapping LUTs currently used for film: https://github.com/ampas/aces-dev/blob/master/transforms/ctl...

You have several really great WebGL demos on your site, e.g. animation_physics_level

For some reasons they don't work in IE11 which has WebGL support. Is it because of Three.js or your xg library?

I try to push the limits of WebGL, I'm using almost everything there is, plenty of extensions (bear in mind these are not really exotic features, most are supported by majority of GPUs out there, native desktop games use much wider set of capabilities, it's just that WebGL implementations are only exposing them slowly).

In general Chrome has the most complete WebGL implementation, though Firefox does seem to be catching up recently (they do push for WebGL 2 so some features are popping up in WebGL 1 as extensions, but for example Firefox uses much older version of ANGLE and also no DX11 ANGLE in sight there, so on Windows Firefox is still quite behind Chrome).

IE11 WebGL on the other hand has troubles even just with basic WebGL specs, it still has broken and not implemented features, not even speaking about majority of extensions.

Is it possible to reproduce with something standard that most browsers can use, e.g. Unity3D or Flash?

You miss the point of a WebGL demo

Is the source of limitation browser implementation of OpenGL? Or is it a combo of the browser + OS? Or Browser + OS + graphics drivers?

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