How close are we to this?

[brkurt]

I've checked out of few of these, but this came from the Blender Artists site, so it is a good yardstick.

The question I want to ask is: "How close is Makehuman to creating these kinds of virtual people, using open-source code, and the GPL?" It is a serious question, if you look to see how much the service at

http://www.gravitydesignstudios.com/ costs.

and here is a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cCEkZtCI8Q

Does anyone remember the Geisha project? It came pretty close...

[Rhynedahll]

I watched the video, but I don't see anything that I would consider greatly more advanced than MH.

I believe the animations could be copied exactly with a MH model at this point.

Some people are working on materials for Cycles, so the photorealistic aspect is probably just around the corner. I think something very similar could be accompished with the Blender Internal.

An artist could probably add the details to the skin texture for the face.

The hair isn't something that MH actually does, but I think it might be done with Particle hair in Blender, especially since there isn't a lot of head movement in the video.

[Manuel]

Yes, I quote Rhynedahll.
MH need some improvement in eyelashes, but the rest is just matter of textures and shader.
Btw, I'm pretty sure the hairs are polygonal, very similar to this one:
http://digitalbabes.jp/gallery/Nikita2.jpg

So MH can reach this level in hairs too, it's matter of artists that decide to help us to build a good hair library.