What this company (snapperstech.com) did is put together an upgraded control "rig" to manipulate facial expressions, taking into account muscle limits and interactions, skin elasticity, etc.

A little more info in the video's YT desc :
-Adaptive rig: which allows combining any number of expressions using optimized list of blendshapes.
-Real facial muscles constraints: the advanced rig logic simulates real facial muscles constraints.
-Advanced skin shader (for Maya and Unreal): holds up to 16 wrinkles maps and 16 dynamic diffuse maps with micro details and pores stretching.
-Easy to manipulate using facial controllers and/or GUI.
-Compatible with all game engines and animation packages.
-Smooth transition between all the expressions.
-Adjustment layer: freeform manipulation of multiple regions of the face to create unlimited variations of the same expression.

The real-time rendering part is achieved by the Unreal engine itself. The final rendering performance still relies mainly on the hardware used.

what you saw was a mesh with a skin shader rendering in real-time so that's how fast it renders. didn't look terribly hi-res, the real advancement here is the quality of the skin shader(for realtime) and the fidelity of the facial rig, having proper face target shapes all blending together to get complex movements with skin compression/stretching/wrinkling at this level have historically been out of reach for anything but pre-rendered cgi.

They can probably drop libraries of mocap data on this with face markers that match those manipulation points you see in the video, and animators can use them to animate, or clean up/change the motion capture data.

and the skin textures/pore detail/face model are not a technological achievement as much as the work of a skilled artist, and the deformations are the result of someone who really knows their anatomy.

since there is no animation in this video, no performance, it's hard to judge how realistic it feels. the real trick is always seeing it animated.

Yeah, the real-time aspect of it is insanely good, although I'd still like to know how much of the rendering budget it takes up, i.e. is this usable in a game or just a research project at the moment?

What do you mean by "only one modifier is being applied"? Which is my other criticism of the video; a voiceover explaining the tech would have been more interesting than the music.

I don't believe that "multiple modifiers" would make this look better, for the simple reason that if you're demoing a technology like this, you end with ALL the bells and whistles to make it look as good as possible.

The reason it doesn't look quite there is because only one modifier is applied at a time, for the purpose of the demo. You must imagine the possibilities if multiple modifiers are put in altogether. Also, the rendering is done in real-time, so this is in itself pretty amazing.

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considering what it takes to render actually photoreal CG at 4K, doing it in real time at 60 fps is at least 10+ years away. and that's extremely generous. this stuff looks awesome... for realtime renders in a video game. they're way the fuck off from photoreal.

Are they saying this was rendered in real time by a consumer desktop? I mean, otherwise the framerate and resolution of the final product don't mean much.

Real Time Facial Re-Enactment has been added as a related post - related requested by bareboards2.

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Real-Time-Facial-Re-Enactment

Ice Cube joins Symone Sanders, David Gregory and former Rep. David Jolly on the Real Time panel for a discussion about race, white privilege, and policing.

Who would have guessed that "Seats moved forward for landing" would be so near to knocking your teeth out?

And this 6 jolt ride takes about an hour in real time.

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Dangit, after Rogue One, everyone is thinking these things are in real time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assuming it's in real time, it just looks slow because it's so damn massive.