Building a photorealistc face

[Darkwing]

I'm workingo on changing a project that I'd started in Anim8or to Animation Master, and then making a feature film, but I need a little help. I need someone who can make a photorealistic face. I've tried four times, but it comes out way to wonky to work. The rotoscopes are attached to this post and if anybody is willing to do it, please let me know!! All I need is the face, you don't have to do the whole head becuase I have different ideas for the hair and the rotoscopes attached are just guidelines for the project. I don't need the face textured or rigged, I can do all of that, all I need is it built, so help me please!

Oh, the face is about 10 inches tall if that's neccesary.

[ruscular]

My Tai Chi class cancel because of my ride, so this is a gift and a plea to anyone that wants to hire me. I am networking with you, as I have no doubt that you will be famous some day. The basic rule of building a face is using a sphere then copy a section and use that for edge of eyes, mouth, and inner nose. Then you shape the circle with a hole to whatever shape to want. Then connect all the circle to each other, so that animation will be easier. Think circular when connecting the dots. let eyes flow into the mouth and nose and end up with a round face. Building face is like putting onion layers on, as we are..............oops, damn that donkey in Shrek!

 

Keep tweaking it as you see fit.

Darkwing.zip

[MattWBradbury]

I threw your images into FaceGen Modeller 3.1 and this is what it returned.

 

 

Here are some othoginal views of the wire mesh.

 

 

 

The program is great for producing rotoscopes of the face because it removes hair and other elements from photographs including perspective.

[phatso]

Woo! That looks like a hot program. How well does it interface with A:M? When you get done, do you have a splined model you can rig and put pose sliders on, and all that?

[ruscular]

Woo! That looks like a hot program. How well does it interface with A:M? When you get done, do you have a splined model you can rig and put pose sliders on, and all that?

 

It doesn't seem to interpret you picture into the model, but gives you a rough estimate of the head with a series of slider for variable input. Looks like a nice program, $300 eek!

 

It export to LW6, for which there is a LW6 import/export plug-in for AM from somewhere.

[Darkwing]

Thanks a lot guys, this really helps!

[MattWBradbury]

It doesn't seem to interpret you picture into the model, but gives you a rough estimate of the head with a series of slider for variable input.

 

Actually, I didn't touch the model at all. All I did was position about 10 cursors to tell the program where things like the edges of the mouth, the center of the eyes, and nose where, and it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to run through a series of adjustments to get the best fit to the face. Those sliders in the picture is what it finally came up with after that time period. You could go through and make the face's shape or tone more masculine or feminine, adjust the race hierarchy, or even adjust the age, style, and the symmetry of the face. If you aren't entirely satisfied with the face, it is incredibly easy to just grab a part of the face and adjust it to the proper proportions. It works a lot like A:M's magnetic mode, but it automatically adjusts skin tones and form to get the most realistic appearance from your adjustments.

 

How well does it interface with A:M? When you get done, do you have a splined model you can rig and put pose sliders on, and all that?

 

The face is already rigged, and you can adjust the pose sliders; unfortunately, I have been unable to get any facegen models into A:M that aren't converted to tri polygons instead of keeping the quad continuity. All of the sliders and textures are exported with the model, but A:M has a hard time retexturing the new model which creates visible seams all over the face.

 

 

The cool thing about this program is that you can create faces that don't even exist, and they will look realistic. One of the most influential uses of this program is for gaming, where game designers need hundreds or thousands of different faces. The popular video game Oblivion implemented this program into their engine, and they were able to create an entire games worth of faces extraordinarily fast, and no two faces looked alike.

[Darkwing]

That's cool. Is it possible that you could attach a model without the textures that canh be used in AM? If not, can you attach any form of the model that AM will read, textured or not.

[MattWBradbury]

The only applicable export is the 3ds form, which is in tri patches, which makes it extremely hard to see what you're looking at.

[phatso]

Hmm. Does it start out with nurbs? And regarding the tri polygons, could one just go thru and delete lines until everything is quadded? But it would still be polygons, not splines? Dang.

 

Or did you say tri patches? Is it really in patches? Or polygons?

[markeh]

This might be OT-ish.

[ruscular]

Not to bust anyone cap, But if you want to press a button and have it make character, then you should ask Martin to make one for you. I made a face so that you could learn from it and it took me about 3 hours making that face. I am hoping that you could see how I did it and so that you could one day make a good realistic face. You guys are talking about using another 3D program to make a face for which you now tell me its not AM capatible. There are Poser program that will make face and body, maybe that's what you would be looking for. The face generator no doubt looks like a good program for whatever it was design for. Talk about dangling a spoil carrot in front of my face.

[phatso]

There are those of us who need to get on with animating, or we can't afford to be doing this at all. I'd be perfectly happy to cheat, on the assumption that I'll learn to model as I go along.

 

In fact, I've decided to cheat in a different way: taking one of the models on the Extras dvd and squenching it around to make it look completely different.

 

(If we can claim "squetch" as a word, I can claim "squench." )

[ruscular]

I am not against short cut, but if you have to deconstruct a model from a tri angle, then you just as well model from scratch. Like I said it took me 3 hours to make a face, and maybe less. Its much easier to build then to destruct and safer too, The program works better constructing then deleting. because after you delete a line, then you have to delete the cps as you go along and thats an extra step. Also most of the tri-angle mesh are very taxing to AM memory. The whole idea of using patches so that you can animate it easier without taxing your system.

 

I am going to shut up now as talking about another 3D program can get you in trouble on the forum.

[MattWBradbury]

Making free models for someone demands efficiency in time. Had he asked how to make a face, a more technique approach would have been taken. That's why I said that the diagrams could be used as rotoscopes. Tracing and coping models is nothing that'll give you bragging rights, but it gets the job done when your in a time crunch.

[robcat2075]

unfortunately, I have been unable to get any facegen models into A:M that aren't converted to tri polygons instead of keeping the quad continuity.

 

Facegen claims to export to OBJ. The OBJs it makes won't open in A:M?

 

I've gotten OBJs before that kept pretty good quad continuity.

[robcat2075]

hey, their sample OBJ files actually look rather promising when imported. There would still be some editing to do but at least it's not all triangles.

 

[Darkwing]

I will say that I'm using Ruscular's version, it helps me a lot to see where the splinage is in a face made with AM and I greatly appreciate it. As you can see from my failed attempts, I'm not really good at faces

[phatso]

That's what my first attempts looked like.

 

Something I found useful: take the 32-patch sphere from the library and pull it around until it's shaped about like an egg, with modifications to make it human. Sort of like the featureless model heads stores use to display hats. Change the surface to some garish color. Then model a new head over it, pushing and pulling on the control points until they almost sink thru the egg shape but not quite. The garish color tells you when you've gone too far.

 

From there, you just need to even out surfaces a bit. At this point, bias handles are magic.

[Darkwing]

Thanks, I think I'll try that on my next attempt.

[MattWBradbury]

I didn't know there was an OBJ importer in the downloads section.

 

What I like about the texture there is that you can take the tga and make it much larger to get a lot more resolution out of it. Did you have to flatten the face?

 

Hey! That horribly deformed face looks familiar! It looks very similar to the first ones I made

 

-----

Here's the head model:

 

 

face.zip

 

You'll have to do some tweaking with some of the splines, but for the most part it's usable.

[MattWBradbury]

Here's a randomly generated face. Works pretty darn well.

[ruscular]

That's what my first attempts looked like.

 

Something I found useful: take the 32-patch sphere from the library and pull it around until it's shaped about like an egg, with modifications to make it human. Sort of like the featureless model heads stores use to display hats. Change the surface to some garish color. Then model a new head over it, pushing and pulling on the control points until they almost sink thru the egg shape but not quite. The garish color tells you when you've gone too far.

 

From there, you just need to even out surfaces a bit. At this point, bias handles are magic.

 

Interesting Idea! I like it. Might even want to make a basic head shape without mouth and eyes. One for various races, maybe.

 

the other tip I would add is when you have a 2 rotoscope to put them on the same window. One for the model to go over the other just to look at it. When you start to get heavy on the spline its nice to just look at the photo without spline over on top. Then at times I'll open 2 window of the 2 views and start pulling cps from both windows.

 

You can download a primitive plugin to make various basic shape, so you don't to have find the 32 patches spheres. much easier to right click wizard/primitives/ and create. Bamm! you have a sphere.

 

http://www.sgross.com/plugins/index.html

[ruscular]

Its not a bad face Matt! However it is very spline heavy by 2x. any chance to generate something close to a 1000 patch?

 

1880 is huge if your going add a body and animate it.

 

I am going over it for editing it down to lower patches.

 

If your going to do another one, can you do a girl?

[MattWBradbury]

I already started this face when you asked, so I'll get a girl up real quick. This one is George Bush.

 

 

And yeah, there are three different sizes as far as patch count goes: high, medium, and low.

[MattWBradbury]

Here's a young female face.

 

[ruscular]

Here's a young female face.

 

 

do you have the mesh and can you control how much patches you want to use? I'm disecting the male face you put up.Im timing it to see how long versus from scratch.

[DanCBradbury]

No, there is only 3 selections for patch density. You have a high, medium, and low resolution patch selection. Here's a zip of just the skin models for each resolution.

MultiRes.zip

[phatso]

I like the guy with the big nose and chin. All he needs now is a pair of horns and a pitchfork.

 

I've been having great luck starting out with one of the models on the extras CD, and squenching it around until it's barely recognizable. The hard part is getting the surfaces really smooth (I'm modelling a young kid) and that takes a lot of pushing and pulling CPs and bias handles.

[Darkwing]

Ha ha, this is cool, i think that if I had the program, I would just build faces all day for no reason. Can somebody try this out for me, it's a sketch, so everything doesn't line up perfectly, but try it out with that program please.

[Darkwing]

Sorry about the double post, but just to show what the face is actually for.

If you want to see what the OLD captian Heroic was like, visit Cosmic Camera/Captain Heroic