Creating Face Morphs from Existing OBJ

SadRobot

Ahoy,

I've been messing around with a machine learning project called PRNet (https://github.com/YadiraF/PRNet) that can create 3d models from photos of people's faces. This seems like a great tool for creating Daz characters, especially likenesses. So here's a quick example.

Take this picture of Alison Brie: http://sfwallpaper.com/images/alison-brie-wallpaper-12.jpg

Feed it into the project and you get an OBJ file that looks like this: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/89/506115981453a8421ff8e9fc0ecaf1.png

It's essentially a mask (like the kind you'd wear to an halloween party) that has the broad geometric characteristics of the face in the source image. Great! And while it's pretty low res and kinda bumpy, it's actually really easy to apply a Blender smoothing modifier, then subsurf the whole thing to make it pretty reasonable looking.It even outputs a face texture that's not stellar, but could provide a userful starting place if the lighting in the original shot is fairly even.

My question is, what's the best way to bring this model into Daz and use it to morph a character's face? Would I need ZBrush or something like it to accomplish this task?

Thanks.

Richard Haseltine

With ZBrush you should be able to project the mask into the Genesis whichever mesh, though I can't remember the tool name. You'd need to be careful at thee dges not to add a line, of course. You mush use the full figure mesh (without any fitted items such as the Genesis 8 Eyelashes) at Base Resolution. You can either use GoZ to send the model across and bring it back, or you can export as OBJ and bring the modified version back with Moprh Loader pro (Edit>Figure menu).

Seven193

I don't use ZBrush, but I don't think it has a one-button solution for it.

 A Daz character head has eyeballs, teeth, tongue, ears, nostrils, mouth, etc... lots of small details and holes in the geometry.  And this face you're generating, well, has none of that.  No eyeballs, no nostrils, no ears, no holes.  It's basically just holds profile data.  

But, I think you can load it into ZBrush or any 3D modelling program and use it as a reference model.  Like for example, if you load both the reference face, and the base Daz character, you can scale the Daz model, so its front profile matches up.  Then switch to the right profile, and scale the Daz model so it matches up there too.  Just basically pushing and pulling vertices until all profiles match up.

And if this face learning program created a face model with ordered faces and ordered vertices that were the same for each model, someone could take this one step further. Let's say they created a base face model, and then shaped it to fit a Daz character face. You can then generate any face, use the base face model and extract the vertex deltas, then take those deltas and apply to the Daz face via a projection mapping table. That should give you a one-click solution, but probably with a lot of gotchas... Just a thought.

SadRobot

Thanks everyone. I figured there wasn't a one click solution, but these ideas sound good. I'll update here if I get something working.