can any FACEGEN users help me here?

Toobis

So from anyone experienced with this whole thing, can you tell me what sorts of facial expressions work best? it would appear a normal just blank expression is whats needed but its actually not easy to get a full on facial shot of someone emotionless. Do any other types of facial expression work ok in your experience? any suggestions?

background

Any expression on the source photo is going to get baked into the texture. That might be what you want if you want to create a miserable looking character for example. It's best to avoid photos with the teeth showing since the teeth will end up on the lips, so that would need some texture editing to fix it. I don't worry about the eyes since I usually replace the eye textures anyway. One area that can be quite challenging is eyelashes. Facegen applies the eyelashes over the eyelid, so that's a problem if you want your character too close their eyes.

nonesuch00

You would need to look at some of that deep fake software and feed it video and multiple images so it could reconstuct a reasonable 3D fascimile and then figure out how to export it, or actually in your case, just find frames in the video that are expressionless once the deep fake swap was instantiated for the 3 recommended angles and export those frames and use them for Facegen. The skin materials, a key to recognition most times, are almost certainly going to be a mess though.

outrider42

That is just how the software works. It really does need a blank expression. The software is expecting you to use your own photos. Like others said, teeth are an absolute no go. Pretty much any expression is a no go. You need a passport style photo, one that is evenly lit and as high res as possible.

Anything less, and it just doesn't work. You have to consider that Facegen is basically taking that photo and mapping to a 3d face. That is all. It is not doing any sort of AI integration of its own, it is fairly basic in what it does. This goes for pretty much all of the apps that do this for Daz. So what you see in the photo is what you are going to get in your face texture.

It would be cool if we could have new software that is capable of doing what some of these AI generations do in 3d. They do exist. You can take pictures and turn them into 3d objects right now with your smartphone. There are workflows that show how to do this with a person. But it requires dozens of photos.

WendyLuvsCatz

if it's a celebrity or public figure an AI like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney could spew you out lots of images you could use in Facegen

with the added bonus of no one photographer's work being used

paulawp (marahzen)

I used FaceGen for a while and still do a lot of images from 2D source images. In my general practical experience, you want a neutral-expression, closed-mouth, head-on source image - the cleaner, the better. (I was never practically able to make use of the optional side profile in FaceGen so I can't comment there.)

What kind of source images are you using, and what is your goal in using them? Are you wanting to create a recognizeable likeness of a real/specific person or just create something that generally resembles a source image?

Newer AI generators have since come along, but I still personally prefer Artbreeder "portrait" for source images, as it can produce fairly clean and photorealistic images, and provides for predictable, detailed modification of images from one generation to the next. There are/were a couple of other sources that I've utilized in the past, but one is gone and one is no longer free.