Let's start the week with another worthy entry in the "Thanks, I Hate It" category. Perhaps the creators of Backrooms should have brought Jev Belyaev on board.
According to the artist, this character was created by combining various scan datasets and processing them through a custom-built FACS tool in Houdini. The facial render test was made with Blender and Houdini, with rendering handled by Cycles.
Jev Belyaev is a Lead Character FX Artist at Netflix and recently published his horror animation alongside an in-depth breakdown focused on custom systems and technical pipeline. No AI was used, as he emphasized, just "hand-built tools, Houdini, Blender, and a lot of late nights":
