Skin Stretch
Computer graphic research from the USC Institute of Creative Technology is a method to produce highly realistic human skin with ultra-fine detail:
Simulating the appearance of human skin is important for rendering realistic digital human characters for simulation, education, and entertainment applications. Skin exhibits great variation in color, surface roughness, and translucency over different parts of the body, between different individuals, and when it’s transformed by articulation and deformation. But as variable as skin can be, human perception is remarkably attuned to the subtleties of skin appearance, as attested to by the vast array of makeup products designed to enhance and embellish it.
Advances in measuring and simulating the scattering of light beneath the surface of the skin have made it possible to render convincingly realistic human characters whose skin appear to be fleshy and organic. Today’s high-resolution facial scanning techniques (e.g. record facial geometry, surface coloration, and surface mesostructure details at the level of skin pores and fine creases to a resolution of up to a tenth of a millimeter. By recording a sequence of such scans or performing blendshape animation using scans of different high-res expressions, the effects of dynamic mesostructure - pore stretching and skin furrowing - can be recorded and reproduced on a digital character.
ICT Graphics out here slayin!