facegen is cool

[poopipe]

I imagine some of you might have come across Facegen - if not, it's a pretty cunning bit of software that allows you to morph a single head mesh into a fairly wide variety of different shapes according to age, race etc. using sliders and by manually manipulating the mesh in little 3d views. You can also hand it some photos and have it generate (pretty convincing) heads based on them.

It's the sort of thing I would dismiss on first sight for the same reasons we all refuse to use Poser or Quidam but having been tasked with the generation of a custom head model for it at work I've actually come to love it.

these are a few screengrabs - remember they all use the same head mesh (about 2k polys) and base texture, it's just been fiddled within the app.

[Glottis]

hmm... nice one...

how´s that.. can you import the mesh you made into Max or Maya?

That´d be awesome, especially for huge crowd scenes or something.. (that is to say.. if you can apply a more detailed and realistic textures on them too)

[poopipe]

yeah, it outputs .obj files - either as a WYSIWIG thing or a neutral expression and all your morphs as separate files.

creating your own head requires an extra bit of software but it takes .obj files - it's restrictive in creation of the base mesh but once you have one you can add further alternative head shapes (anything that would work as a morph)

It does texturing too - either ripped from the photos you give it or they give you a pile of detail textures - we're going to handle texture creation ourselves using other cunning methods so I've not done anything in that direction.


it's worth grabbing the demo for a quick play as it does loads of stuff - the company is called Singular Inversions

[Postal Pete]

Hey, that woman looks like someone from TES4: Oblivion

[Fredddy]

I have used Facegen before and have to admit it's great for creating morph targets.
You mentioned Poser also, which I believe is a very under rated bit of software, if only it had a decent render engine.
Daz3d, one to the largest content creators for Poser, also make a program similar to Facegen.
It's called Faceshop, but I don't think the meshes produced are as clean as from Facegen.

[softocean]

Just curious if anyone has used Quidam by N-Sided

http://www.n-sided.com/3D/quidam.php?rub=1

It seems to be able to create entire 3d human character models from a combination of parts.

[poopipe]

I had a proper look at Quidam fairly recently as we were considering trying to license some technology - we decided not to in the end.

It's better than poser in that you can actually model with it but it relies heavily on content packs which basically don't seem to be available from anywhere.

The downside to Quidam is that it doesn't do low poly meshes - the game export extension allows you to output meshes at 0 subdivisions but since they're built to be smoothed they look like crap.

I'm not usually a fan of this type of software as you're heavily restricted in terms of what you can produce with it.

What appealed to me about facegen (and propmted me to create the thread) is that you can create your own base meshes and use the facegen algorithms to deform them using racial/sexual/age characteristics. This effectively removes the restrictions inherent in most software of this type and as such makes it actually useful