Context. Real time rendering has many challenges to overcome, one of them being character realism. One way to move towards realism is to use wrinkle maps. Although already used in several games, there might be room for improvement, common practice suggests using two wrinkle maps, however, if this number can be reduced both texture usage and workload might be reduced as well.

Objectives. To determine whether or not it is possible to reduce the number of wrinkle maps from two to one without having any significant impact on the perceived realism of a character.

Methods. After a base character model was created, a setup in Maya were made so that dynamic wrinkles could be displayed on the character using both one and two wrinkle maps. The face were animated and rendered, displaying emotions using both techniques. A two-alternative forced choice experiment was then conducted where the participants selected which implementation displaying the same facial expression and having the same lighting condition they perceived as most realistic.

Results. Results showed that some facial expressions had more of an impact of the perceived realism than others, favoring two wrinkle maps in every case where there was a significant difference. The expressions with the most impact were the ones that required different kinds of wrinkles at the same area of the face, such as the forehead, where one variant of wrinkles run at a more vertical manner and the other variant runs horizontally along the forehead.

Conclusions. Using one wrinkle map can not fully replicate the effect of using two when it comes to realism. The difference on the implementations are dependant on the expression being displayed.