FaceGen vs Face Transfer vs Headshop 12. Pros & Cons?
tj_1ca9500b
Posts: 2,048
Just curious as to what the pros and cons of [FaceGen, Face Transfer, and Headshop 12] each are, as compared to each other, in your own experience. Anyone here worked with all 3? If so, what are your thoughts? How well do they do in relation to each other as far as replicating faces and such? What issues have you noticed for each in relation to the others?
Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
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I only used FaceTransfer and at first I was very excited about it, even bought it. I now don't use it at all.
With the generated textures and from the front it really looks good but if you remove or replace the textures the shape resembles the original very little.
Not even the nose and lips look right.
I would only recommend it if you want to have multiple diverse characters, not necessarily resembling the originals. I am hoping they will launch an update that makes it better and maybe allow you to place some point on the face to help the algorithm find the important places.
I only have FaceGen, and it allows to put points at various locations, eyes, nose, mouth. Both front and side. There is a lot of customization and export options. It is fairly good, as in you get a resemblance of the original photo.
Source images remain the core issue, most photos aren't ideal, so getting well lit front and side shots remain paramount. I guess that's true for all of these generators.
I'd rate FaceGen very capable, I use it from time to time to get some fresh character ideas, get some interesting morphs, but it doesn't produce any perfect characters you can straight away use without any tweaking.
Let's not forget that HeadShop also:
1. Auto-finds all 50 points - no need to manually pick points
2. Automatically turns/aligns heads to frontal - you can use photos that are turned away from frontal
3. Lets you morph between two people via LoveChild.
Otherwise I agree with Outrider's assesment.
I agree. Actually I use HS and FG together. HS is better with pictures. FG is better with textures. I turn both morphs down to 40 to 50%. One nice thing about FG is that you can export the texture to other skin texturs that you own, not just the base Genisus character.
At the risk of self-promotion, I made a product which I believe vastly improves the shapes which are generated by Face Transfer:
https://www.daz3d.com/face-transfer-shapes-for-genesis-8
I would agree that nothing is going to match a proper skilled sculpt, but you can generate some very useful characters using Face Transfer and my add-on.
Facegen doesn't call it Lovechild, but does have a function to morph between two people (whatever is currently loaded plus an .fg file), with a separate slider to blend between the textures.
Facegen also has a large variety of editing tools inside its app. You can use the pointer and grab a part of the face and adjust as you wish. You can even choose to use symmetry or not. You can also create a full face from scratch, without any source photo at all. You can use a dial to adjust color and ethnicity, and many other things. And then you can use any texture you wish to export into Daz. So if you don't like the default you can swap them out with anything.
My ranking is:
1) FaceGen Artist Pro
2) Headshop
3) Face Transfer
Facegen limits its source texture resolution to 1024 x 1024. I think Face Transfer use the full source texture resolution, so the face map has much more detail. You can tell the difference, because when I use FG, the eyebrows are sometimes blurry, but when I use FT on the same picture, the eyebrows have much finer details.
And Facegen uses a blackbox approach to generating faces, which places limitations on what kind of face it can generate. FT uses no such approach, so it may be better on generating faces outside the 'normal' range of Facegen.
Yet another reason why you might want to throw out textures generated by Facegen has to do with its eyebrows. Compare the shape of the eyebrows between FG and FT, and you may notice FG tends to create straight eyebrows, while FT creates curved eyebrows. If you used Facegen for a long time, this observation may surprise you if you haven't noticed it.
Face Transfer has its own problems, like stretching the neck, flattening the upper lip, and gives no options to remove asymmetry.
Despite of all this, you could probably use a combination of FG and FT if you're a good artist.
+1
For what it's worth here are Headshop 12 and Face Transfer rendered straight out the box on G8F Base both using the same source face photo. Plus Face Transfer with PhilW's Face Transfer Shapes base morph at 100%. I don't have FaceGen so cant compare that.
Thanks for the comparison!
What's going on with the Headshop face textures? The 'fade to white' is rather disconcerting...
We need the original photo to make a fair comparison. We need a point of reference, and also which light did you use? I have Facegen, so if you upload a pic I can try it out. If you don't want to upload that pic, then we can find a pic online that can be used by us all. How does that sound?
I have made comparison shots to Headshop in the past. They are somewhere in this forum. I have not done the Face Transfer. I actually do own it, but I just never bothered. I do not have PhilW's add on.
Original source image https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse458/09au/content/html/exercises/images/imageplane/front.jpg
Scene lighting is https://www.daz3d.com/iradiance--light-probe-hdr-lighting-for-iray--expansion-5
DTLP6 - Light Probe 32 - Soft
Dome rotation at 30.21
Tone mapping as default but Burn Highlights and Crush Blacks both set at 0
Spectral rendering on, faithful, cie 1931
A duf with blank scene with the full settings is here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/e5/302c16ac5af212f618e3a4aeb6a002.duf
As stated before, with the texture on, face transfer always does good.
I think you should also compare without texture, just the shape, to see how good the shape itself resembles the photo, and how much is the texture in there.
I'm not a HS user, but I think it doesn't do full body blending with color matching.
I think there's a way to match the color of two images by remapping the histogram of one image to the histogram of another. Histogram color matching. This is what Photoshop's Match Color tool does, and it works pretty good most of the time. Headshop should look it up if they want to compete with FG and FT.
Headshop 12, Face Transfer, Face Transfer plus FTS @ 100%
No textures applied. G8F Base included as comparison.
Wow, FTS is amazing. I knew Face Transfer by itself is not so good as I have it and haven't used it since I bought it but with this comparison FTS is going in my wishlist.
The Headshop face looks terrible to me.
In the most recent update of FG, which came out late last year, the maps are now 4096 by 4096.
I'm talking about the source image, not the custom maps. Yes, FG can utilize custom maps of any size, but the source image that the face is created from is limited to 1k. If you don't believe me, look in the data directory where Facegen is installed, and you'll see a list of 30 or so jpegs which are all 1024 x 1024. Facegen also stores your source image in this format, as a 1k jpeg.
Well when 4K face photos are common they'll probably need to upgrade their source but since they have to use photo enlargement algorithms almost all the time to even get the user supplied photos to 1Kx1K resolution it's not going to make those source photos any better by stretching them up to 4K. Enlarge an image in GIMP by 50 times over 100% and see how good it looks.
I may be wrong about the source photos. FG may actually save 4K source jpegs with their latest version. They're always saved in powers of 2, so it would be either 1k, 2k, or 4k.
Something else I just noticed. I painted the source eyebrows red because I wanted to see how they were being blended, and it looks like Face Transfer is adding its own eyebrow hair to the end of it.
dave230, the source textures are Genesis 8 itself. This goes for all 3 software. You can confirm this easily by comparing your face texture the base genesis 8 female face textures. Everything lines up. Where you see the brow is the outer edge of where the software starts applying the face from the photo you use. All 3 apps have an edge where the face gets applied. Eyebrows go just far enough to go beyond the boundaries of most of these types of software. As a reminder, Facegen allows you to replace these default textures and use and use any set of textures you like. You could even use a male set if you really wanted to, though the results might not be great since the UVs are different.
One thing that both Headshop and Face Transfer do is they do not use the eye texture of the photo you use at all. If you look that is probably just the base genesis 8 eye texture tinted brown. I am not sure if Face Transfer tinted it brown itself, or what. Facegen actually makes an eye texture, but it is terrible and I very rarely ever use it. So I know why the other two apps would avoid it. Its just impossible to do because you rarely get a photo where the full iris is visible. So for my pics I just tinted the eyes brown. I later made an eye texture using the facegen eye as sort of a guide for the color.
I tired using the photo Mart1n71 used in Facegen. I do not have the light set used, so I am just using a white spotlight and distant light like I do for some simple portraits. I dialed the face shape in at 80% rather than 100.
For kicks I applied a Bluejaunt girl's texture preset and swapped the base color textures back in. I thought it was interesting. The trans maps of the bluejaunte character have no painted on eyebrow, which is why the brow is faded looking. A quick trip to GIMP or similar could change that.
Edit: I'm adding another render of her with the Bluejaunte girl's skin preset, but this time I dropped the translucency to 55, which allows the base color textures from Facegen to be more visible.
I think that is getting there. Though that does go beyond what the test was about...which is how it does "out of the box". Facegen offers a lot more control IMO, but maybe does not offer the out of the box look of Face Transfer. This has more to do with the quality of the default base genesis 8 than Facegen, IMO.
I suppose the Face Transfer with PhilW's Shapes wins this particular round, but I have some real issues with that. Nothing against PhilW, its a great product, but that we need to buy an add on to make Face Transfer actually work is just terrible. Without his product, Face Transfer's result is pretty pathetic. If you judge this without his product, I would say Facegen wins easily. It matches the textures and produces a reasonable result. Looking at the pics, I think Facegen blended the textures better, on Mart1n71's post it looks like there are still signs of where the photo was blended in as the face is lighter than the rest of the skin. In my render using the default genesis 8 settings, it is much harder to spot this. It would appear that Face Transfer is doing something to the surfaces, because those do not look like the default genesis 8 skin settings. Either that or it is the lighting.
Yes, it could be just the outer edge of the blend mask, but I did notice the color of the eyebrows change too sometimes, maybe due to the skin color matching. If you're scanning a face with blond eyebrows, it would look strange if the blended eyebrows weren't blond too.
@outrider42 wow, Facegen did really good! Dos it work only with one photo or can you add more for better accuracy?
Also, can you post photos from 45 and side? I am curious how good the model looks from those angles.
I believe the most recent update allows you to morph two different pictures together. However, I never thought to use that feature on two different pictures of the same person.
In Facegen, you can add 1-2 profile pics as an additional reference, but if the lighting or makeup is significantly different, it can mess with the textures. There is an option telling FG to *not* extrapolate from some aspect of the profile pics, but I can't remember whether it is "skip the topography, just use for texture" or "skip the texture, just use for topography."
I personally don't feel like profile extrapolation is FG's strongest element. You have the option to customize the face further with a bunch of dials*, and mostly I just use a full face pic for initial extrapolation and go to customize the face some more using whatever profile or 3/4 shots I have as a reference.
*if you've played a Bethesda sandbox RPG newer than Morrowind, FaceGen's dials would be familiar to you, because the face customization tools in those games are based on FG, and there were people who had figured out how to get *.fg files into the PC versions of the games.
The option you remember is with profile pick you can choose to use them for the geometry but ignore them for the generated texture (and implicitly the lighting and makeup and other details on the profile pictures on the generated texture).
You also have the option to completely drop the generated texture and generate a generic texture that you can control the (amount and darkness of the appearance of) melanin in.
"One thing that both Headshop and Face Transfer do is they do not use the eye texture of the photo you use at all. If you look that is probably just the base genesis 8 eye texture tinted brown. I am not sure if Face Transfer tinted it brown itself, or what. Facegen actually makes an eye texture, but it is terrible and I very rarely ever use it. So I know why the other two apps would avoid it. Its just impossible to do because you rarely get a photo where the full iris is visible. So for my pics I just tinted the eyes brown. I later made an eye texture using the facegen eye as sort of a guide for the color."
Outrider, it is partially true; HeadShop DOES use eyetexture on Gen 2, but not on Gen 3 or Gen 8. The reason is that those two figures are built with independent eye maps. And yes, even FaceTransfer is substituting eye textures for real textures.