Dynamic Facial Color

I ran across a recent paper called "A Practical Appearance Model for Dynamic Facial Color". I was absolutely fascinated with the idea that someone figured out how to make the color of a digital model's face change by simulating constriction of blood vessels. In short, the emotion of the character affects the digital skin's hemogoblin distribution - a really mad character gets red in the face, whereas a terrified character gets ghostly white in fear. The example image below is a frame from a video that plays in real-time at 53fps with all heads moving! That's some fast calculation.

 

The team that worked on this has some really amazing stuff on their site that's definitely worth a look. They note rendering issues with small pores and wrinkles, but I'm sure they'll work out those kinks (literally) as technology progresses.