FaceGen: Nice for ref or for lazy modelers

Makkon

I found this neat little program called Facegen while looking for some decent face references (never found them, of course) and tried it out a bit.
http://www.facegen.com/
I must say, not what I expected. Pretty cool, and you have really good control over the faces you are making. Apparently, whith the full version, you can export models and even use photos that the program matches up automaticly, which is pretty sweet. I can imagine that future game engines may use this technollogy for online personalization. Give a try and disscuss what you think, as well as show what you made.

ebagg

It's decent. I had some experience with it working on a mod where the team wanted everyone's faces in the game and they really wanted to use facegen. It does alright, if you want a bald version of your face with no facial hair, but it doesn't get the subtlties down very well. I had to tinker around with the vertices quite a bit to REALLY nail the likenesses and the texture only does part of the face, which warrants quite a bit of paintover.

Daz

Oblivion used it. 'nuff said

SuperOstrich

It's hard to find many things wrong with Oblivion from a pure gamer's point of view, but I must say....the faces were one of the worst features graphically. They looked incredibly similar from one character to the next, and some combinations of age/race/features that the game generates just look downright weird at times. Brilliant game though, I can't wait to see what they do for the next one.

Xaltar

You could customize the faces so they look different enough but that was only if you don't mind playing ugly characters
Awesome game tho, I still play it from time to time even though I have played it through about 5 times.

SuperOstrich

I really meant the NPC's you encounter while playing the game. But even the extremely old characters looked just like other characters you encountered. It was hardly a dealbreaker, but it did bug me a little bit. Occasionally, I'd run into a character that had the same face and the same voice as someone I met in a quest before, and for awhile I thought it was the same guy. Turned out it was just the exact same "random" face and one of the 3 or so voice actors they had.

Neo_God

I initially heard of this program several years ago, from where? Here of course! Haha.

Actually a game called Nosferatu used this program first for the character model's faces. It is a fun little program to play around with though.

conte

Facegen in Oblivion is works best.
So many different faces.=) My hero is freak=)

Toomas

The base mesh they use kinda sucks imho.

pior

Woah I heard of this since ages but just tried it yesterday. Pretty much awesome for concepting heads I must say. Even if technically its not perfect it gives some awesome reference jus tlike Mak said.

Nice!

noritsune

Ahh excellent. The faces in Oblivion were definitely T3h SUCK. I found that with a heroic amount of adjustment in the character generation phase I could actually make someone halfway realistic/attractive. As for those NPCs... yeesh

They used a vast amount of third-party software in that game, no?

Entity

It's looks ok. Although I hate it when newbie modelers abuse it and claim it as their own hard work.

Lee3dee

good tool for making NPC characters that are supposed to look the same. Look out poser!

Goldo_O

There is another cool software that provide semi-automatic faces creation: it's called "3DMeNow Professional 2". You choose two pictures of your model (face and side view) then you can ajust the main lines of the face and see directly in 3D the textured mesh, and you can even make them talk with a voice bot. First thing everyone does is to take some picts of your friends and make them say bullshits ^^
Even if it's not perfect, it's pretty cool to try, and it gives better results than Facegen IMO: better differences of shapes but the mesh isn't very clean though.

Silva_Spoon

We are using the make art button... uh, I mean Face Gen here at work on our current title. I find it valuable for generating a rough mesh to go from. It doesnt give normal maps, it's textures are only on the face and I find it easier to create one from scratch in photoshop. What I have come to take from the program aside from rough meshes is knowledge of what makes one face/head different from the next. After tweaking its sliders (which is painfull because of the way it tries to automatically balance its values to keep the head "right") I began to realize what makes one persons head different from another. Since I create normal maps for the heads, I usually end up discovering the true identity of the character in mudbox. But yes the program does have value. And it is good reference.

arshlevon

this little piece of software is pretty nice for creating characters(evolver), the topology is decent and think for zbrush/mudbox bas meshes this could be cool. it takes a neat aproach cause you can make a family tree and virtually mate 2 characters to produce offspring, and you can keep going to grandchildren.

http://www.darwindimensions.com/content/description.jsp

Neo_God

That program is pretty nifty. especially for only $39. I think it's much better than facegen. And compareing the prices, it seems like if you have to go for a face generator, that would be the much better choice.

However, the randomizer makes pretty freakish looking people.

shagspear

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There is another cool software that provide semi-automatic faces creation: it's called "3DMeNow Professional 2"

[/ QUOTE ]


Biovirtual is now dead. Its been dead for 2-3 years now.. so there won't be any more update to 3DMeNow.