These past few years there has been a good number of amazing realistic CGI human characters created for films, like Moff Tarkin from Rogue One, Gemini Man and Rachel in Bladerunner 2049, but for me Alita : Battle Angel is still the absolute gold standard.

One key component in creating a photo-realistic human character lies in the skin, which is notoriously hard to get right because of the way skin reflects and interacts with light in a VFX technical term we call sub-surface scattering, or SSS for short. This short documentary by VOX is a great crash course in explaining the challenges of creating realistic skin; check it out below –

VOX’s youtube channel has a couple of other short documentaries on VFX that are pretty well made and worth checking out.

Also, if you haven’t seen the art/making of book for Alita : Battle Angel (image below), I highly recommend it.

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