Face Transfer / Facegen and textures
I have Face Transfer for some time now and, despite the pitfalls of an algorythm that tries to recreate someone's facial structure solely from a single picture, the quality of my results are increasing exponentially. I'm not advocating here that I have the exact same face from the picture, but some results are really, really good and similar.
Please note that my process is far from one-click. I choose the picture carefully, pre-edit several small details (I remove all the hair from the forehead, try to equalize the light when there are shadows over the face - even small ones like the nose shadow, and so on), and more often than not I pot-edit the face and lips texture to remove teeth from the lips (when the person is smiling), rebate one side of the face to the other when there is some unsolvable problem in one of the sides (like hair covering part of the eyes or cheeks(, and I finish adjusting some facial features (jaw, nose, cheeks, etc) to try to emulate the original sizes.
Last week I gave Facegen a try. Even with the Windows 95-like interface and the 90's website, I was hoping for better results since it allows the user to pinpoint some facial features, but after trying some of the same faces I had tried in Face Transfer (including some with lateral views to help, something Face Transfer doesn't offer) the results were VERY poor.
After giving it some thinking, I came to a few conclusions about which I wanted your input:
- Facegen doesn't generate a texture (at least I didn't see how to do it). The preview inside Facegen is fantastic, looks absolutely like the person in the picture and is already in 3D, but when it generates a morph and we use the default G8 texture, the look goes away. Face Transfer, on the other hand, generates a texture and although the color is normally WAY off the real skin color, the facial features present in the skin are paramount to the similarity between the subject and the 3D model, at least when in frontal view
- I think Facegen asking us to pinpoint the facial features is NOT an advantage, but the opposite (and here I'm simply guessing, I can be wrong). Face Transfer uses an algorythm to FIND OUT where these points are and, although it would be nice if it allowed us to see and correct these guesses, the algorythm decides. In Facegen's case, I have my doubts if it does anything by itself - it relies in the points we check.
Am I wright or am I wrong?
As an afterthoughy, I REALLY think that today's technology is more than capable of producing a piece of software that we can run at home, using maybe four or five angled pictures of someone, and generate a really good 3D model of the person. The problem is that these softwares are expensive because almost nobody uses it (and the other way around).
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Comments
Facegen does generate a texture including ones for the rest of the body. I find you get the best results when you have a profile image also which is hard to find.
The expensive programs that give professional results are used by professionals and studios, not hobbyists
Thanks for the reply! I'll take a look to see how to generate/get the texture in Facegen. I really think the interface is horrible, so it's probably lost somewhere inside it.
About the professionals x hobbyists, this is something that can be said, through time, about a lot of things, computers included. It once was something only a few people had, today it's in our pockets. My point is that, apart from the more advanced techniques (green backgrounds with motion capture for animation, etc), I really think this inflated price is artificial. Face Transfer takes 30 seconds, run "inside" Daz, and does something reasonable; what wouldn't be possible with a decent software using 4 or 5 views of the person and takin its time (10 minuts, a looong time for this I would say) to create the morph? The gap is too large in my opinion: there's the ancient PC XT for the masses and the ultimate supercomputer for the professionals and not in between. :-)
FSMCDesigns, I swear I tried had, but really coudn't find a way to export any texture. I get the DSF file and only that... Could you tell me how to do it? I'm using the demo version. Thanks!
I'll bet that there are quite a few lurkers wondering why this is such an issue. If you look carefully at the first screen shown, your texture locations and textures to use -- are where ever you told the program to put them/use.
FSMCDesigns ... you said "The expensive programs that give professional results are used by professionals and studios, not hobbyists"
what programs are those that use pictures to create a 3d model? (that dont involve sculpting like z-brush)
alaltacc ... how do you remove the hair from forehead and equalise light and shadow .. (ive tried with horrible results)
@khryss666 , I don't know how much experience you have with Photoshop and similar programs (I use Paint Shop Pro as Photoshop is too expensive for my use case), but what I did was to use the available tools (like the "clone" tool, painting over, etc) to "remove" the hair and paint it over with the same texture/color used by the head. Sometimes I do it in the original picture (BEFORE running it through Face Transfer), sometimes AFTER (in the converted skin). The results are highly dependant on the original picture's quality, resolution, lighting, etc.
Anyway, after a few months using Face Transfer, my verdict is that it does a less-than-ideal job. Yes, it's possible to get reasonable results, but the geometry normally only works well in front renders and the generated skin itself brings all the features from the original picture (like make-up, shadows, etc), when the ideal would be to have a "clean", neutral skin mimicking only the main features of the face.
I still think the problem here is not the lack of technology to do a good job, but the lack of a good tool. The tool is several years old, as are all the similar consumer-grade ones. Maybe the question here is investment (to create the tool) versus demand; maybe it's not economically viable to invest in a pro tool for generating Daz geometries and skins, but technology is not the problem.
Oh, I forgot: I'm NOT a very experienced user of Paint Shop Pro also (my first statement could give this impression). I'm a casual user, I'm sure real pros would do a much better job than I do.
@alaltacc .. yes i use gimp and the same tools and yes sometimes in orig pic and sometimes after in generated skin and also one of the biggest helps so far have been some "face transfer shapes" morphs i stumbled upon .. thank you very much for your answer .. also i have noticed that after using facetransfer and gimp for a long time coupled with the morphs .. i have gottten noticably better with those programs since the start ... so perseverance is helping as well also trying the same pic ofer and over again over time is helping as well