Facegen

[oDDity]

NH reminded of this recently. He showed me a model from some guy who wants to join, and I recognised the head of his model had been generated in a program called Facegen.

This is a program I had forgotten about, mainly becasue it used to be shit.

It basically generates human heads, randomly, with lots of settings you can tweak, but they all used to look nearly the same.

I was lookig at the latest verison of it just now, and it's improved a bit. Here are some heads I generated in it.

We may have to use this, becasue we are going to need literally hundreds of head models, if we want 2 or 3 for every model.

THis progeam now generates a low poly and a high poly model, so they are ready for normal mapping, it also generats the texture, but they are pretty low res and shitty, so they have to be hand painted to improve them.

Another bonus is that the heads come with a complete set of morph targets for facial expressions and lip sync, but using vertex maps, not bones, but there are plugins for converting morph targets to bones when converting to md5mesh. I still dont' know how costly having 1000's of bones is though.

There's also a featire for suppling it with front and side photos of a head and it will make a textured model from it, but I don't know how good that is yet.

[pakmannen]

Is that douglas adams in the center?

[oDDity]

Yes, this is when he shved his head for charity.

The only problem is that I can spot a facegen generated head a mile away, so there is certainly some genericism to them.

[Macsen]

The only problem is that I can spot a facegen generated head a mile away, so there is certainly some genericism to them.

 

The average player is unlikely to be so astute. They look fantastic to me. The red under their eyes make them look like they haen't slept in a while though, so these would probably be guards.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah that is really cool, we could create a diverse population of townsfolk walking around a city with this. I agree it's hard to spot the similarity to the untrained eye. I would say we could tweak the output a little to make it less similar, but that would probably not work since the whole point is to get the model + textures all at once.

[New Horizon]

Doesn't look too shabby to me and if they can be repainted to look better...hell, we might as well use it.

[Macsen]

According to the Facegen website you can stick your own face on there. We could have the entire Dark Mod team walking around in-game.

[BlackThief]

that sounds quite interesting, never heard of it.

 

the general shape of the head looks pretty similar on every head though, looks like the programm just makes some parts/areas wider or smaller, but I guess that's ok for ingame characters, you won't see them upclose like that often anyway.

[oDDity]

According to the Facegen website you can stick your own face on there. We could have the entire Dark Mod team walking around in-game.

 

Yes, but if you read the small print, it doesn't generate Welsh people.

Don't start getting all uppity and nationalistic about it either, it's just a natural software limitation, they didn't code it in on purpose or anything.

[sparhawk]

The heads look pretty similar to me. On all that heads I would say there were only two or three different ones, if I have a cursory look at it. Still, I guess this is not so bad, when we texture them with beards, different hairs and such. Don't know hof far this can be tweaked. There used to be a head generator for Blender as well, where you can tweak all kind of parameters interactively, so you can create really different kind of faces. But I guess with this plugin you still have to do a lot of detail modelling afterwards.

[New Horizon]

Looks pretty slick. You can do all kinds of things to make the faces less similar. http://www.facegen.com/modeller.htm

[oDDity]

And the best thing about it is that any of you guys can do it, it doesn't require any special skills. We all know what faces look like.

I'd say 150 males would be enough, and 50 females.

[sparhawk]

What a crap is this? It doesn't even support Blender? One of the most important 3D apps in this year? 495USD???? WOW! That's quite a lot.

[Macsen]

Give me a hacked copy and I'll do it, and I'll hack it further to include Welsh faces.

[oDDity]

It only doens't support blender in as much as the facial morphs don't work.

You can import the heads into blender though, since facegen exports to obj format.

[oDDity]

I can upload a copy to the FTP if you want to all start making faces.

[New Horizon]

I can upload a copy to the FTP if you want to all start making faces.

 

I'm down with that. Load it up.

[sparhawk]

Do you have a full version? I'm pretty sure I know already where the encryption algorithm for the key is, but it would take some time to actually crack it. Don't know if it is worth though.

[oDDity]

It includes a keygen.

[sparhawk]

Ah! That saves time.

[oDDity]

http://208.49.149.118/TheDarkMod/Files/facegen.rar

[Macsen]

Sorry to sound stupid; what does it mean by 'Input the Site Code without spaces!'

[Ishtvan]

Forgetting about the legality of using a cracked copy for a second and assuming we had a legit copy, what's the legality of releasing stuff made with Facegen in a publicly released project?

[oDDity]

WHo cares, we're not making any money from this, and for all they know, we have a legit copy.

If you have a legit copy then the content you produce with it your own do do with as you please.

I'd be surprised if anyone working on any mod had a legit copy of any graphics software.

 

Sorry to sound stupid; what does it mean by 'Input the Site Code without spaces!'

 

open the program, go to help register, and it gives you a site code. Put that in the keygen, removing the spaces and the two numbers at the end.

[Macsen]

That program is amazing. I fed in a rather awful picture of myself from just the front, and the resulting model looked exactly like me from pretty much any angle. What's more, I aged myself to 80 years old and I looked exactly like my grandfather.