MMO Character Face Customization Pipeline

Mask_Salesman

Hey guy's I was just wondering about the pipeline for face customization in MMO's which I imagine varies between morph points, alternate assets and bone based deformation?

Has anyone here worked on a game with super face customization?

Swapping elements is one thing but the complexity of the character customization on the more recent MMO's is pretty staggering... ;




Speaking of which; who ever made the boobs for Tera is a perfectionist Haha ;P

Ace-Angel

I tend to find that Morph targets tend to work best, since faces require that extra 'precision' that bones could give, but will be messier. It's all about settings up your base mesh as your starting point, making a copy of it, and putting up some big values for cheeks, nose, etc and then exposing the slider and how much your want the vertices to travel from Point A to Z.

Also, some engines have a 50 bones limit per mesh, although many devs try and aim that as a 50 bone limit per character for MMO's game (stuff like capes and etc not included for various reasons).

Alternate assets are a simple case of swapping heads out, with all of them meeting at the seam around the neck, you'll need to 'bend' the Normals at the end of the seam for the face, so that it looks like the two pieces are connected, or else you will get a smoothing error.

Mask_Salesman

Thanks for the reply man, that's a good point about the different bone limits per engine, I figured it may have had to just be general base morphed to the moon.

zzz7net

The most beautiful and realistic face customization I've ever seen it is in Eve-online.
If you wanna see it try youtube watch. And the most ugly customization in the Oblivion I think.

Mask_Salesman

Ok yeah that's alot of work right there haha

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOA8am-6kwA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOA8am-6kwA[/ame]

The player instantly decides front boing, back boing, "junk all up inside ma trunk"

So many iterations... o_0

Paradan

check out the char gen for the phantasy star game, its still only in japanese but its easy enough to sort out.

i liked the interface/gizmo thing they used instead of just a bunch of sliders.

kinda off topic sorry

Hazardous

I would love to talk about the char create stuff that I worked with on Rift, as it was my primary fous for pretty much my entire time there, but last time I opened my mouth about anything to do with it I got hit pretty hard with the 'stop talking about it' stick.

GeeDave

Hazardous wrote: »

I got hit pretty hard with the 'stop talking about it' stick.

I absolutely hate how secret our industry pretends to be, and thus actually becomes it. I understand the importance of protecting an idea that could potentially make money, but we're definitely a lot more "hush hush" than we need to be.

Sorry, slightly off-topic there.

Character customisations... I despise them! I spend about 30 minutes making something that looks like myself, and then thinking "No, that's a silly idea", and then creating something random in about 2 minutes instead. Every.Time.

Someone else has mentioned it, but I hate sliders too, especially when they don't even need to be sliders, like in Skyrim (I think) when you're choosing facial hair and it's swapping geo... why a slider!?

I think we've got a fair ways to go until a "standard" is defined, the Eve one is pretty cool, hovering over the face and changeable bits are highlighted, click and drag a direction to adjust it... way cool.

Morph targets seem like an obvious choice but for something truly amazing I would expect a lot of code support for some crazy ass shit.

Ace-Angel

@ZZZ: The reason Oblivion has such a bad Face Customizer is because they're using FaceGen as their base, in which you only push something in one direction, followed by issues if more then one vertices shares a slider.

I don't think it's a GameBryo limitation by the way, just that if you look carefully, you'll notice parts of a model that are controlled by one slider aren't overlapping with another, hence why certain features for the nose (like the bent end of a nose that curves slightly upwards and is plump) is next to impossible to achieve, although they could share the same blend from one Morph to the next as long as they're only 50% split, so you could get a curved nose, but very thin indeed.

@Hazard: Sad thing is, a friend of mine got in trouble for the same kind of issue, the irony was he was talking about it in general, but the studio thought that somehow, only they had access to Morph Targets and such for character customization.

Makes you think sometimes if everyone and anyone in position of power should maybe at least read a tutorial every now and again not to get people into trouble over generic information which has existed since 1988.

@GeeDave: Sliders are console thing, since the idea of moving left and right feels natural as opposed one that goes up/down or scrolls through lists. It's also easier to declare when it comes to modding last I checked (although you will need to divide it carefully on how many ticks, items, you have exposed to the player).

I personally would like to see sliders that have small dials/lines on them, so if I click on something with a mouse, I know where I'm clicking, sadly however, we still live in a world where sliders slide without reason and aren't built up properly for accurate control.