Facegen 2.0 Released- Now 2.1
outrider42
Posts: 3,679
FaceGen Artist just updated to 2.0, and it is a big one. I got an email with the new features.
- Combine with custom base texture in default UV layout
- Supports Genesis 1 Female & Male
- Minor fixes and enhancements
- Pro version now supports Genesis 8
WHOA! So Genesis 8 support, but the even bigger thing has to be custom base textures!!! As long as the UV matches the base figure, you can use your favorite. This one change alone is a game changer. For Genesis 1 fans, they have separated G1 into male and female options.
So my question is will Daz be getting this upgrade? I already own FaceGen from both places. I have the Home version direct from FG, and the Pro verson from the Daz Store. I would assume that I can contact FG with my Daz purchase about receiving the upgrade.
EDIT: Daz indeed gets the upgrade! 2.1 is available in the Daz Store, and you can upgrade in your downloads.
https://facegen.com/artist.htm
EDIT: FaceGen released a smaller update to 2.1. Its small, but fixes an issue where long file names on custom textures made the export button etend off the screen.
Changes since version 2.0:
- Support custom base color maps without power of 2 dimensions (must still be square)
- Add scroll bar to initial export window for people with many Daz content libs
My personal request would be to have an option to create ONLY textures. Now that the app lets people use any texture, many people may want to experiment with the same model but with different textures. I know I do. But doing so means clogging up a run time with lots of shape morphs that you must be manually deleted.
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Comments
As long as the UV matches the base figure, you can use your favorite.
What does that mean? I can make a Genesis 8 figure and use any skin from a Genesis 8 figure in my library?
As opposed to the skins they create- based off the face capture?
I believe so!
The current version creates a skin based off one texture. So every figure has the same look. Now you can use other textures and have your face blended into those textures. So if you like Alexandria 8, you can blend a FaceGen creation with her textures.
I could be wrong, I have not tried it yet and I wont get the chance today. But I got the email from FaceGen about the update and I got real excited. and had to post it here.
Thanks for the info.
Please update us when you know more!
I bought the Pro version from Daz, but I didn't get an email. I sent them one to see what the cost of upgrade would be. If the store is going to sell it, then I would just buy it here.
I have downloaded it because I bought it before the DAZ Store had it. They've improved the geometry generation of portions of the head morph. I haven't use the new blend photo texture with 3rd party texture yet.
Will watch out for it.
Is it any good? I see a lot of people talk about it but I’ve never been convinced by the branding and videos, is it something I can use to make skins for sale?
You can use it as a base; merchant resources are just that. There is still tons of work to turn a base textures into something worthwhile.
Only if the photos used are your photos that you took or had someone take for you and the skin textures those photo are combined with are yours or a Merchant Resource. Although those Merchant Resources terms would allow you to combine with your own photos and sell them as characters, but not as standalone skin texture sets.
It will be available here at Daz very soon as well.
I thought it meant that if I made a G2F character with FaceGen, I can make her generated skin be mapped as the V6 or Girl 6 UVs, etc., instead of the female base UVs.
But it sounds that you could use your own base skins, now that I've re-read it.
Hi, Daz_Steve,
The FaceGen site doesn't seem to indicate a price increase...so will current Pro owners (bought from DAZ) get a free upgrade, or will it be a paid upgrade? Don't know if you can speak to that yet, but thanks for confirming it will be available soon here.
I think it's a pretty sweet product and one which I definitely use a lot. I paid full price on the FG website btw so like $140 ish. It seems to work best with Genesis 2, pretty good on Genesis 3 and this is strictly my opinion here, not as well on Genesis 8. I mean it works just the same, but to my eye the outputted morph is not as accurate a likeness.
It's so worth the money if you need to create different characters that don't look like one another. To boot, this G8 functionality was a free upgrade so trust me, this is not a complaint.
The new version also seems to offer some new functionality for choosing the base color of the texture but I haven't had the time to play with that. 3 Gigs this week and literally only made this quick render to try it out before hauling my gear out the door.
That's exciting news! Thanks, Steve! :D
I've been putting off purchasing it since it didn't have Genesis 8 support - I'm so glad to hear that it will! I'm looking forward to it's release here. :)
Well I can't distinguish the geometry differences at all for the same morphs saved to different versions of Genesis. Some versions of Genesis will make the geometry look more pronounced in opengl texture preview mode but given the same shaders they will look alike when rendered.
I think it relies too much on photo projection, I would like to see the results under varying lighting such as using less bright front-facing and more that favor the figure's contour and with a different texture.
That's why one should use pictures without flash or artificial light, indoors and with ambient light from the windows in daylight but out of direct light from the windows. Use 3 photos: 1 frontal, and one from each side and it's good to go. Don't apply any postwork to the photos at all. That's if you want the most accurate results.
One is unlikely to find 3 photos like that for any famous person but one full frontal photo in like conditions is usually sufficient.
What you can't do is artistically exaggerate geometry like skilled 3D artists, 2D artists, portrait photography artists, and videotographers do so that those exaggerated features are always readily apparent from most visible angles in most lighting conditions.
Confirmed! Thanks for the info. They've sent me the links after providing my purchase info. Nice not to have to wait!
well I was able to use g3 skins/faces I made on g8 you had to select more sections in the surfaces tab but results were pretty good I though but this'll make things easier if it has full g8 support
It does have full G8 support that I saw, by default when you export to a G8 character it uses the G8M Base or G8F Base as the default color maps. You can change it to any custom texture you want so long as the UVs for the custom textures you choose match the UVs of the Genesis version you are exporting too.
Its not even that. FaceGen is taking 1 photo, or at most 3 photos and turning them into a full 3D shape. So of course it relies largely on photo detail for the creation of its models. If it was to do any more, you would need far more than 3 photos, and you would need highly specialized equipment. That is can do what it does with so little is pretty amazing. If there is another software that does it better for Daz, I'd love to know about it.
I think back to Metal Gear Solid 5. For that game, they created a special process to make 3D replicas quickly using photos. But this was a very highly specialized setup. They had 37 (!) high pixel cameras in a ring around the person's face. They all took pictures at the exact same time. This information was fed into a computer with dedicated software to create a head shape for the game. It took an hour for that process to work. Many of the characters in the game were done this way, and the technique allowed a lot of the game's staff to cameo in the game, including Kojima himself. Even with all this tech the models still don't quite look photo real!
If you are interested in a video detailing the process, then watch this.
At any rate, thanks for confirmation @DAZ_Steve. I hope you guys have a big splash page planned for the update reveal. It would be the perfect time to pimp FaceGen now that it has Genesis 8 support.
I must say in my testing so far I can see a variety of improvements. Some a subtle, but noticeable.
1 The program is faster in general. It doesn't take as long to generate a face or to export.
2 The created morph in Daz seems to be rigged a bit better. The hair I applied fit properly. The eyes moved side to side and up and down without popping out.
3 The texture created is much less messy than before. The eyelids follow the UV better (if you look close at the face textures, you'll see what I mean.) This was the very first time that I have not gone in and edited the eyelids on the texture FaceGen gave me. I was happy with what it gave me. The face also seemed to blend in better with the rest of the original texture. Now this could just be the model I tried. I'll try more later. The only editing I did to this face was to fix some black marks on the lips.
4 Using Genesis 8 is just like using the others. Its the full G8. I tested with a model I made for G3, and I can tell the differences in the textures. The G8F FaceGen model is using the G8F base textures.
5 Swapping textures is as easy as it is locating them in your runtime. You just have point FG to their file location. You must do this for each texture type. Head, Torso, Arms, and Legs. This is done in the Export window. So if you want the textures from Charlotte just load up those textures before exporting.
6 FaceGen now lists each of your runtime locations as a selectable folder for export. Previously you had to locate them yourself a bit. A nice feature for people with runtimes across multiple hard drives. You might have to set it up the first time, I don't know. I did not have to. FG 2.0 actually loaded with my previous project in its window, so it memorized some things.
My only complaint is that FaceGen does not fit my screen properly. I have a standard 1080p screen, but the export bottun is hidden under my task bar and for some reason I cannot resize the FG window. I had to move my Windows task bar to the side to export.
This was made with a single front facing photo. All I did was edit the lips and use NGS2. This is Genesis 3. As usual, I did not use the eye textures FG gave me. FG still makes weird eye textures, that has not changed. However, the "eye socket" texture turned out well, and I used it.
Looks really good. I was very impressed by that lady's Japanese.
I also have now had the chance to test Facegen 2.0 with both default & chosen textures for Genesis 8 (I chose DAZ Original flagship products too) and the results are far better than the textures generated with prior version of FaceGen.
I did that earlier too, and although it's looking like other commitments mean I won't get much chance to use the new version for a bit and so can't comment on the software just yet, I wanted to credit the Facegen support team where due. I e-mailed them with my enquiry and Daz purchase details just before 5pm UK time, and by 5.30 I'd had a reply complete with the upgrade download links. I certainly can't fault that for a helpful and rapid response.
I know I said I've got no time to mess about with V2.0 and I don't, but I knew that wondering how it handled G8 would probably distract me from what I'm meant to be doing too, so here are two quick road tests. So quick that I didn't even let them finish rendering fully. G8M Reg is wearing his out-of-the-box Facegen skin (but not the additional textures - I took one look at those, realised they were still drawing eyelashes on the skin and retreated), and G8F Ivy is wearing an old Skin Builder 3 texture. Both could use more work skin-wise, but I think they'd make more than adequate starting points for when I've got more time. They were quickly created in Facegen (I agree with the comment that it's got a LOT faster - practically instant), and would have been a lot better if I'd been able to hang around. The geometry around the eye area is vastly improved, as is the weirdness that used to go on in the corners of the lips.
Did they fix the eye-warping bug? That was my dealbreaker with the previous version.
It is much improved. It might still happen with more extreme shapes, but so far the eyes have looked right in my tests. That was also a reason I had my model looking to the side in my post, I wanted to show that the eyes are not popping out or doing weird things.
I can still see the baked-in highlights from the textures with this, you should try it without the rendering auto-headlamp and rely on the natural light instead if you want to illustrate the accuracy of the lighting vs texture baked highlights.
Yep, as too many old-school poser/daz artists still make highlight-baked textures which is blatantly out of place under most other lighting conditions; unless you ONLY use blaring front-facing lights for your scenes. The best way to judge a good texture for versatility and accurate lighting is when it has no highlights/contour-lit highlights baked into the texture itself.
There is no headlight in the image. It is a skydome HDRI, and it is kind of bright.
This is not about old school Poser users, it is about what FaceGen 2.0 can do. The texture was created by FaceGen, with very little editing done to it on purpose. I spent maybe a minute to fix black areas on the corners of the lips. That's all. With a little more time, more can certainly be done, but this is nearly an "out of the box' texture and that was the intent of this image. Otherwise it would be rather deceptive to present a render with lots of texture editing, and then say "Hey, this is what FaceGen can do!"
Also, she is looking to the side to show the curvature of the eye, which has greatly improved in FG 2.0, as previous versions were bad about deforming the eyesball shape.
I'm liking the improvements, the eyes are much better! Lately I've been playing with adding more products to my facegen creations.
Facegen 2.1, skin builder 3, NGS, and growing up