Creating a realistic Face from stock photos in 3D
kyryia
Posts: 47
Hi,
for some time now I wanted to create some custom 3D morphs and textures from Stock or Family photos. I tried doing this with Facegen but found the results more then lacking in terms of quality and accuracy.
I saw that iClone has a similiar feature but I am not sure if I can export a morph and texture back to DAZ3d. So I really want to be sure that works before investing money in that program.
Is there any other way (Programs or tools) for me to recreate both texture and morphs from a high quality stock photo that I can apply to a G2X Model in DAZ3D. Any help is greatly appreciated.
regards
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Comments
There is BlackSmith3D, but I don't know how good it is for this:
http://www.blacksmith3d.com/?page_id=1781
I cannot claim to know all the programs that are designed for this purpose, but I have tried a couple of the popular ones, mostly out of curiosity. Based upon that, I have found that they rely very heavily on the texture maps created from the actual photographs to achieve their likenesses. This has also been mentioned in numerous other threads by other posters. The underlying mesh is only modified enough to fit the textures properly by altering the size, position and shape of gross features such as the eyes, mouth and nose. Applying any other texture map results in a character that bears at best a passing resemblance to the intended person. Given the shortcuts represented, this should not be altogether surprising. Content creators that often use celebrities as the subject of their characters use a variety of techniques, usually combining dialed morphs and mesh manipulations in modelling programs to achieve likenesses. It is painstaking work with close attention to small details. Even in such cases the final results depend on the accuracy of the textures to complete the illusion, but to a far lesser degree than the quickie solutions. It is simply not an easy thing to do, and there are really no effective replacements for time, patience and a measure of skill. That is true for much in the world of 3D art, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.
In the past it was best to work off "mug shots" where you had 2 images of the face, one straight on, the other from the side. Divide your window into front and side and scale the images to the size of the models head, then "trace" with morph targets.
IClone you would only be able to export a static mesh and facegen would be superior to it anyway
Faceshop now Headshop by Abelone is another choice but honestly hand doing it will prob give much better results be it with morphs or say sculpting base mesh with out changing vertex order in Zbrush, Blender or Sculptris, last two free first very expensive.
Hi!
Back in highschool I worked at a place that worked on a facial-recognition software that mapped faces to 3D heads. My job was to put weight points on critical areas of the face: tops and sides of the eyes, corner of the mouth, each peak of the lips, the eye brows, the nose, the ears... You get it.
Anyway, as others have said, the quality is very much based on the resolution. When I worked there, best results were a face dead on, blank stare, and the same pose from both sides. It's going to be a waste of time to try it unless you have all of these requirements.
This software was very, very expensive. But this was also ~9 years ago.
Welp Facegen, Faceshop/Headshop, iClone and Poser faceroom basically do the same thing.
Poser uses a form of Facegen but it only works on its own included figures however in Poser you can swap heads and load the other expression variations as morph targets, you even if you have iClone 3Dxchange pipeline could export iClone heads and stick them on Poser characters and use the morph brush to shape the neck join but is an awful lot of fluffing around. Prob Simon your best choice as in iclone itself the head texture has a UV option for him.
None of these give as good a result as manually sculpting the mesh though.
Morphing is one task; texturing is another.
Irregardless of which morphing utility is used; one is still going to need to use an image editor for perfecting the texture IMHO.
Anyway, recently I made another tutorial for starting face texturing which may or not be of help.
DA Link
HeadShop does quite a bit of "sculpting". Admittedly very experienced sculptors can do impressive sculpting - HeadShop is for the rest of us. It provides a very easy way to get good results in a short time.
Here are some Youtube "how-to" videos to provide an overview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7YbRsm8m9I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIlrJUByJj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Yvd2DaiDg
Is it ever going to be available in the Daz3D store? I use a MAC.
This one breaks at 2:28...
This one breaks at 2:28...
Yeah he knows.
I find Facegen can make adequate likenesses as long as suitable source photos are used. Here's an attempt at Ellen Page.
The problem comes when trying to use the face in Daz as the facegen Exporter doesn't seem to produce very good results.
It's a ways off before it reaches consumers, if ever, but probably likely, one can make 3D models of people (with a tolerance of 5mm) using video clips.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/watch-artificial-intelligence-create-3d-model-person-just-few-seconds-video
A regular 2D video, not a special 3D camera. They explain it. You can guess that it works better in high resolution with the 3D model subject turning 360 in a T-pose but the write up says that a moving video works and the accurancy is induced by summing the differences between frames, so even without a pose 360 degree video it'd probably be good results.
Same thing really with FaceGen, you need one good frontal picture minimum that isn't excessively bright or dim (which is a film and photography method used to hide flaws and to create dramitic lighting) so that facegen can sample pixels over the entire face and estimate their distance from the camera and sum them up into a coherant geometry of the face for the morph. 3 hi-res photos, two in profile from left & right work best.
As the developers of FaceShop and HeadShop we have 12 years of history with photo-to-3D software for Poser and DAZ. I agree with JMC that the biggest challenge is to get a good quality, well lit picture. One additional challenge is that very seldom is a portrait "full frontal", which means that the head is turned left or right, up or down. This problem bewilders photo-to-3D software, as is the issue of presenting open smile.
I am happy to report that we are getting close to the beta stage of HeadShop 11, which I consider a real breakthrough in a few respects; HeadShop 11 will:
1. Unlike competing software where you have to manually pick eyes, nose, chin, mouth etc (about 22 points in toto), HS 11 will automatically find all points without the user picking a single point.
2. We have also mastered the open smile issue, with real teeth derived from Genesis figures showing. Again, it is something the competition can't presently do.
3. Most importantly, HS 11 will master the turning head problem and turn (pun intended) a bad problem into an asset. We will actually have better shape similarity with turned heads as with straight "full frontal" photos. It is an industry first!
4. HS 11 will also address way better texture mapping, an area where we lagged behind the competition. No more!
Please stay tuned, we will need knowledgeable users for beta testing soon!!!
Laslo
And will there be a Mac version?
Not directly. Apple is to blame - they make it all but impossible to develop outside their "walled garden" appstore. It is possible that we will release a cloud version, which of course will be platform neutral (work on all platforms). We already have a cloud app called PrintAhead (printahead.net) that is platform independent and free to use.
Ps. PrintAhead already uses the open-smile code and handles open-smile heads quite well.
I will beta test if possible. I remember beta testing, I think it was FaceShop over a decade ago. It was quite fun back then How time flies.
That's nice but will the open smile also be accurate with no smile?
And, just teasing, but for HeadShop 12 you can go ahead and make SW that is accurate for all expressions and erases the expressions for a no expression while allowing the expressions to be converted to face rig targets.
That's the goal:-)
Cool! I will upgrade.
Will owners of the previous version receive a free upgrade or at least a discount on the upgrade?
Will owners of the previous version receive a free upgrade or at least a discount on the upgrade?
Yes, a discount upgrade (and get their money's worth - promise).