Meet Emily - the most lifelike animated actress ever made

Animation industry experts are hailing Image Metrics for making the most realistic computer generated character in history.

'Emily' is an extraordinary animated woman created using a ground-breaking modelling technique that captures minute facial movements.

Her real life counterpart is actress Emily O'Brien (Jana, THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS).

First, a computer generated replica was made of Emily by the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies who was a partner in the project. The actress then sat inside a sphere of LED lights while she was photographed making 35 different poses. The light patterns allowed the shine of her skin to be captured independently from her main skin tone, with hundreds of measurements taken for each millimetre.

"The CG models provide unprecedented detail of natural facial expressions - down to skin pores and fine wrinkles," a spokesman said.

Emily is considered to have avoided "uncanny valley" - in which animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.


Emily was then animated by Image Metrics, a company that makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films and computer games. They filmed O'Brien giving a 90-second performance using computer vision technology, which captured the footage pixel by pixel. The team then applied this to the computer-generated character - a process that only took one week.

Emily O'Brien and her animated self made their worldwide debut at Siggraph 2008, an International Conference on Computer Graphics, in Los Angeles this month.