Generating high-fidelity real-time animated sequences of photorealistic 3D head avatars is important for many graphics applications, including immersive telepresence and movies. This is a challenging problem particularly when rendering digital avatar close-ups for showing character's facial microfeatures and expressions. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including skin furrowing and finer-scale facial movements, we propose to couple locally-defined facial expressions with 3D Gaussian splatting to enable creating ultra-high fidelity, expressive and photorealistic 3D head avatars. In contrast to previous works that operate on a global expression space, we condition our avatar's dynamics on patch-based local expression features and synthesize 3D Gaussians at a patch level. In particular, we leverage a patch-based geometric 3D face model to extract patch expressions and learn how to translate these into local dynamic skin appearance and motion by coupling the patches with anchor points of Scaffold-GS, a recent hierarchical scene representation. These anchors are then used to synthesize 3D Gaussians on-the-fly, conditioned by patch-expressions and viewing direction. We employ color-based densification and progressive training to obtain high-quality results and faster convergence for high resolution 3K training images. By leveraging patch-level expressions, ScaffoldAvatar consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with visually natural motion, while encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles in real time.

He does admit, though, that not everyone has his studio's history, nor his personality. "I am a - what do you say? - a different breed," says Josef. When he was directing his first game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, feedback from some early playtests was "super bad". "I'm like, they're wrong, they're wrong, because I know it's great," he says. He's spoken before about resisting pressure to put micro-transactions - in-game purchases - in his projects, and is uncompromising despite his studio's close relationship with EA, one of the world's biggest publishers.

Alan Wake II is a fantastic game. It tells a twisted, serpentine story of paranormal murder, shifting realities and demonic possession, with two brooding investigators at its core. Developers at Remedy Entertainment are masters of mood and Alan Wake II is their latest showpiece, highlighting the studio's eye for psychedelic terror and complex mysteries. This game is packed with monsters, ghosts, cults, Old Gods, rock operas and mind-bending perspective swaps. And on top of all that, its character models and set pieces are absolutely gorgeous.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Earlier this week, on the red (technically striped) carpet of the Met Gala, The Dropout star Amanda Seyfried answered a tough question: What did she think about the then-impending Writers Guild of America strike? Wearing an elegant Oscar de La Renta dress made with 80,000 gold and platinum bugle beads, she told a Variety reporter that everything she'd heard from writer friends indicated they would picket if they couldn't reach an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Poised, draped in priceless garments and jewels, she remained firm. "I don't get what the problem is," she said.

Visa is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating more than 215 billion payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. When you join Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.

Developing web interfaces to interact with a machine learning (ML) model is a tedious task. With Streamlit, developing demo applications for your ML solution is easy. Streamlit is an open-source Python library that makes it easy to create and share web apps for ML and data science. As a data scientist, you may want to showcase your findings for a dataset, or deploy a trained model. Streamlit applications are useful for presenting progress on a project to your team, gaining and sharing insights to your managers, and even getting feedback from customers.

David L. Craddock is the author of more than a dozen books about video games, including Break Out, about the history of Apple II games, and Rocket Jump, about the history of first-person shooters. "I tend to write a lot about games made in the '80s, '90s, and early '00s," Craddock says in Episode 481 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I love to write about creative people who had big ideas but very, very tight restrictions, and I think that from that comes some of the most enduring products--most enduring experiences--ever made." One of Craddock's most recent books is Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, about the making of Blizzard's classic action RPG Diablo II. Craddock says this volume was a much bigger undertaking than Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I, about the original Diablo. "There was just so much more to juggle in terms of timeline, in terms of game," he says.

Jolly employees who stayed with Riot Games following the acquisition mostly ended up working on "Wild Rift." They helped develop Riot's vision for mobile gaming, which followed the development model gaining popularity in Asia. As of June, "Wild Rift" players have spent around $60 million on game purchases, according to App Annie and Sensor Tower, which provide estimates based on App Store and Google Play data. Riot said that over 70 million players in the world have tried Wild Rift so far, and logged a total of over a billion hours players since the first testing phase began.

Disney Parks have reportedly been urged to overhaul the theme of its famous Splash Mountain ride. The park's popular log flume ride has recently been getting calls for Disney to alter its whole attraction motif. In the wake of the protests against police brutality and racial injustices and amid the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, fans and parkgoers have claimed that Disney's Splash Mountain is based on the 1946 Disney film "Song of the South" -- which has been dubbed one of the "most racist movies" for its stereotypes of black people. According to a report from CNN, the controversial live-action animated musical film has long been criticized for romanticizing the post-Civil War period in South America. "Song of the South" is set in a plantation in Georgia in the 1800s during the Reconstruction era.

We're living in an age of mass, democratised creativity – or at least that's what the technology industry likes to tell us. You can shoot a movie or record an album on a smartphone, you can become a household name with a webcam and a YouTube channel, and you can download any of a dozen applications and build a video game from nothing. But the latter is an intimidating notion. Games are ultimately complex mechanisms, constructed from code, involving physics, narrative, animation and audio. There has been a deliberate effort within the industry to make creative tools more accessible, arguably spearheaded by Unity, a technology that both powers games and lets users create them – and yet, designing and constructing a game can feel overwhelming.