Artini said:

New creation made with Face Transfer 2 and with the clothes from recent purchase.

Fun! Very determined looking.. 

New creation made with Face Transfer 2 and with the clothes from recent purchase.

crosswind said:

Oh, I see it. That's the pJCM issue, the corrective morph - "pJCMFootDwn_75_L/R" on the pants when foot rotates... Usually the author fixes pJCMs... but since this is a set of dForce outfit, I presume ArtTailor decided not to fix them other than leaving it for the users to simulate.

You may just simulate with "Start Bones from Memorized Pose...", that'll be fine.

Yup, worked like a charm...Thank You!!!

Oh, I see it. That's the pJCM issue, the corrective morph - "pJCMFootDwn_75_L/R" on the pants when foot rotates... Usually the author fixes pJCMs... but since this is a set of dForce outfit, I presume ArtTailor decided not to fix them other than leaving it for the users to simulate.

You may just simulate with "Start Bones from Memorized Pose...", that'll be fine.

And it'll be cumbersome for most of the users to handle OBJ files with Morph Loader Pro... "out of the box" morphs (DSF) + shaping presets will be much better.

Artini said:

Looks great, everyone.

I am still thinking about how to fix these dark areas on the face

I am getting sometimes from Face Transfer 2.

Some tool in Daz Studio would be great to have for such purpose.

 

I am not seeing the classic dark Face Transfer 1 stains so far in testing FT2 - what I do have some occurrence of is stretches, often with mottling. I don't know the technical details but clearly it's from trying to match and merge the face detail into the rest of the skin and it's definitely made worse by details of the original image, though not entirely predictably. This is one of the worst I could find this morning:

This came from an early (2020) Artbreeder image, made before I was using Daz.

My later source images were created, or kept, with an eye toward avoiding things that caused bad staining and washout, like highlights and shadows. This particular source image has severe shadowing on the side of the face that made it essentially unusable with FT1. (And no, FaceGen didn't handle it particularly well either. Through a good part of 2023, my workflow involved FaceGen sourced textures, with shapes created by FT1.) Even here with FT2, the deep shadows with the wrinkles near the mouth are basically a dark stain on the mat file. Here's a closeup of the base mat file that was created by FT2, which explains the issues this skin has:

Texture file removed

It has some nice details right in the front, but as it wraps around, the baked-in wrinkle and deep shadow are part of the face mat files. (Also bad in this example are the "stretch" marks which are excessive and abrupt. This one needs a lot of work if I wanted to actually use it.) At present, afaik the only way to fix this is with Photoshop or the image editing program of your choice. In my face creation career, going back to summer 2021, I've come to the conclusion that I'd rather start with the cleanest source image and initial skin mat files that I can, and then add details by other means. 

FT2 was a huge improvement over FT1 (and FT1, along with FaceGen, is why I'm here to begin with, so I'm not badmouthing it). It's able to clean up facial hair and other things that were an impossible hurdle in FT1, made years ago. Perhaps Face Transfer 3 will be able to take the source image material and continue around the side of the head or elsewhere on the body. In the meantime, I am happy with FT2 and FT2 shapes and will continue my projects accordingly.

Before trying out Face Transfer 2, can someone please explain some of its features?

Can I apply a different skin material (including eyes colors etc) on the generated figure. For example can I apply Victoria 9's or Olympia 9's skin MATs on the generated face, keeping just the new morph?

Also after generating a face, does it create a "morph" that I can then further edit with other morph sliders?

KenYano said:

Thank you! That helped. I found out the link lead to another location on my computer which is Documents/DAZ 3D/Studio/My Library/data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/..... which begs the question... How did it get there? I've never installed any third party items in that folder.

Well it happens... if you wrongly select the folder when extracting / installing files or if you save morph assets to the wrong Library...

Some characters have deeper inner lower eye sockets that result in disctinct creases... I would not suggest you further buy a couple of shaping products let alone there might be no dedicated morph for this.

If you have Mesh Grabber or know Blender, it'll be pretty easy if you give it a couple of drags or smoothing that area in Blender and import the fix morph...

outrider42 said:

Comparing Zelara's normals to the 8k normal details is not really apples to apples. The normal maps for Zelara (and most all characters) serve a purpose for creating the illusion of extra geometry, and they tend to use it for "larger" features, if that makes any sense. Essentially, the normal maps for Zelara replace the HD morph. If you render her with her HD morph, she will come out pretty similar to what she looks like with her normal maps applied. Take notice that most Daz core G8 characters do NOT load any normal map when you load the HD character preset. So normal maps tend be a replacement for HD morphs in this way. No this may not apply to non core characters, as PAs are free to do it any way they wish. This is just the way Daz cores handle it.

Rather, the 8k normal maps I am talking about provide the micro skin detail, a much finer detail than what Zelara's is intended for They can be used across multiple characters because in a way they are kind of universal. Though of course it would be great if they made unique detail normals for different characters. You could use both of these maps at the same time, if you use PBR Skin. PBR Skin has some extra slots for 'detail' maps. So you can have Zelara's regular normal maps plus these 8k detail maps at the same time.

Now to be clear, all normal maps are meant to be a replacement for pure geometry. That is their purpose, normal maps exist because using pure geometry for realism means a lot of geometry, and that is computationally heavy on resources. Until we have hardware and software that can handle billions of polygons without grinding to a halt, we will still need normal maps.

Why these maps work is not just because they are 8k, but because they are high quality PNGs. Just take a look for yourself. You have these maps for G9 in your starter essentials, and almost any G9 core and many 3rd party characters use them. Open the maps in a pic viewer and take a look at how detailed they are, with no compression artifacts.

That detail is key. The closet anybody came on G8 is bluejaunte, but they made their 8k detail maps for specularity. Either process can work, and you can find many threads praising bluejaunte characters for their realism. Those 8k spec maps played a big role in why they look so good. On the flip side, I came to realise their normal maps were too highly compressed. In a closeup render I was perplexed by some odd looking jagged edge like artifacts on a character in large renders. The cause turned out to be the compression in the normal map, if you see compression in the normal, that can end up in your render. In lower resolution renders these artifacts are not visible. Anyway, the micro details cause the light to bounce around the skin. With a good material setup the small cracks of skin absorb light in a way that makes it look soft. This technique also does a good job of reflecting light in a way that people tend to like. The skin is not universally shiny, rather the parts that are in direct light shine more, while parts of skin out of the light look correct, and soft. But the SSS has to work with it, too. It needs enough translucency for the skin to absorb the light just right. You don't need anything exotic here, at least I don't think so. You don't need any wild colors in the SSS channels. You can even use textures in the SSS channels if you wish.

A cheap and dirty way to make characters look good is to simply apply a material preset from a bluejaunte character to your character, and work off that. Then replace the base color and translucency maps with your prefered character. You can also replace the normal maps (particularly for the reason I mention above). You can use whatever normal maps you like, using the ones the character came with would probably be fine, but you don't have to. Or, you can even skip the normal maps, that would work for a youthful character. This might look great immediately. If not, you can tweak the trans values and sss settings slightly until you get there.

Don't be afraid to experiment. Sometimes the best results (at least for me) come from using 2 seemingly different skins with each other. I think I used bluejaunte Misumi base colors as the trans maps for the first pic with Zelara. Again, I altered them to have more Zelara features, like the moles on her face.

This is the same Victoria with Zelara's material preset applied. This includes Zel's normal maps. She doesn't look bad, but she could look better.

 

I also made another version of her tweaked differently. This time I removed the bluejaunte spec maps, but kept the 8k normal details. In the dual lobe settings, I used another converted G9 texture. This time it is the "R" texture, I assume the Reflection/Roughness texture as that is where it is used. But I kept the Zelara base color along with the Misumi trans maps. But that's it, 4 textures per surface, nothing more. No bump maps or multiple spec maps. Just a color, trans, spec and normal. It is a pretty simplistic setup. In this pic, all the skin micro detail you see is coming from the 8k normal map. The detail under her eyes, the pores on her cheeks, those are all from this normal map. Some pores are baked into her base texture, but if you zoom in, you can see how they pop more here than the default skin. On the default skin they look flat. Here they look more 3 dimensional. Then look at her arm. On the default you see some really bumpy skin. This comes from the bump map, and they are not as clean and crisp as the 8k normals in the other pics. Even here the 8k can be limiting if you zoom in enough. There just aren't enough pixels in this area. Still, the result is improved IMO. Also, this last pic is using PBR Skin, but it doesn't have to. This last pic isn't meant to be better or worse than the first pic I posted in the thread, just a different take.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. 

I knew bump maps added "fake geometry". I remember bow that I knew about normal maps as well at some point, since they are details about how light would be reflected from different angles but I guess I kind of took it for granted and didn't think about it in detail anymore.

I makes sense that not just the resolution but the quality of the texture map itself is the reason for the added realism.

I am trying to convert an older G3 model to G8.1 or G9. (G9 I've had trouble with the textures fitting because of the UV mapping)

I think using better and more up to date normal maps will increase the quality of this conversion considerably.

Any idea how I could increase the quality for the diffuse/base color texture as well?

Looks great, everyone.

I am still thinking about how to fix these dark areas on the face

I am getting sometimes from Face Transfer 2.

Some tool in Daz Studio would be great to have for such purpose.

Comparing Zelara's normals to the 8k normal details is not really apples to apples. The normal maps for Zelara (and most all characters) serve a purpose for creating the illusion of extra geometry, and they tend to use it for "larger" features, if that makes any sense. Essentially, the normal maps for Zelara replace the HD morph. If you render her with her HD morph, she will come out pretty similar to what she looks like with her normal maps applied. Take notice that most Daz core G8 characters do NOT load any normal map when you load the HD character preset. So normal maps tend be a replacement for HD morphs in this way. No this may not apply to non core characters, as PAs are free to do it any way they wish. This is just the way Daz cores handle it.

Rather, the 8k normal maps I am talking about provide the micro skin detail, a much finer detail than what Zelara's is intended for They can be used across multiple characters because in a way they are kind of universal. Though of course it would be great if they made unique detail normals for different characters. You could use both of these maps at the same time, if you use PBR Skin. PBR Skin has some extra slots for 'detail' maps. So you can have Zelara's regular normal maps plus these 8k detail maps at the same time.

Now to be clear, all normal maps are meant to be a replacement for pure geometry. That is their purpose, normal maps exist because using pure geometry for realism means a lot of geometry, and that is computationally heavy on resources. Until we have hardware and software that can handle billions of polygons without grinding to a halt, we will still need normal maps.

Why these maps work is not just because they are 8k, but because they are high quality PNGs. Just take a look for yourself. You have these maps for G9 in your starter essentials, and almost any G9 core and many 3rd party characters use them. Open the maps in a pic viewer and take a look at how detailed they are, with no compression artifacts.

That detail is key. The closet anybody came on G8 is bluejaunte, but they made their 8k detail maps for specularity. Either process can work, and you can find many threads praising bluejaunte characters for their realism. Those 8k spec maps played a big role in why they look so good. On the flip side, I came to realise their normal maps were too highly compressed. In a closeup render I was perplexed by some odd looking jagged edge like artifacts on a character in large renders. The cause turned out to be the compression in the normal map, if you see compression in the normal, that can end up in your render. In lower resolution renders these artifacts are not visible. Anyway, the micro details cause the light to bounce around the skin. With a good material setup the small cracks of skin absorb light in a way that makes it look soft. This technique also does a good job of reflecting light in a way that people tend to like. The skin is not universally shiny, rather the parts that are in direct light shine more, while parts of skin out of the light look correct, and soft. But the SSS has to work with it, too. It needs enough translucency for the skin to absorb the light just right. You don't need anything exotic here, at least I don't think so. You don't need any wild colors in the SSS channels. You can even use textures in the SSS channels if you wish.

A cheap and dirty way to make characters look good is to simply apply a material preset from a bluejaunte character to your character, and work off that. Then replace the base color and translucency maps with your prefered character. You can also replace the normal maps (particularly for the reason I mention above). You can use whatever normal maps you like, using the ones the character came with would probably be fine, but you don't have to. Or, you can even skip the normal maps, that would work for a youthful character. This might look great immediately. If not, you can tweak the trans values and sss settings slightly until you get there.

Don't be afraid to experiment. Sometimes the best results (at least for me) come from using 2 seemingly different skins with each other. I think I used bluejaunte Misumi base colors as the trans maps for the first pic with Zelara. Again, I altered them to have more Zelara features, like the moles on her face.

This is the same Victoria with Zelara's material preset applied. This includes Zel's normal maps. She doesn't look bad, but she could look better.

I also made another version of her tweaked differently. This time I removed the bluejaunte spec maps, but kept the 8k normal details. In the dual lobe settings, I used another converted G9 texture. This time it is the "R" texture, I assume the Reflection/Roughness texture as that is where it is used. But I kept the Zelara base color along with the Misumi trans maps. But that's it, 4 textures per surface, nothing more. No bump maps or multiple spec maps. Just a color, trans, spec and normal. It is a pretty simplistic setup. In this pic, all the skin micro detail you see is coming from the 8k normal map. The detail under her eyes, the pores on her cheeks, those are all from this normal map. Some pores are baked into her base texture, but if you zoom in, you can see how they pop more here than the default skin. On the default skin they look flat. Here they look more 3 dimensional. Then look at her arm. On the default you see some really bumpy skin. This comes from the bump map, and they are not as clean and crisp as the 8k normals in the other pics. Even here the 8k can be limiting if you zoom in enough. There just aren't enough pixels in this area. Still, the result is improved IMO. Also, this last pic is using PBR Skin, but it doesn't have to. This last pic isn't meant to be better or worse than the first pic I posted in the thread, just a different take.

Please put the Viewport into a non-textured Drawstyle if you need ti show a nude figure.

That is a morph with a non-zero default value. Edit>Figure>Zero>Zero Figure Shape should gt it back to the base shape, then if you go to File>Save As>Suport Assets>Save Modified Assets the list of things to save should enable you to identify the culprit - cancel the dialogue, to avoid any risk of modifying something that shoukld not be touched, then uninstall the problem shape and check to see if there is an update; if not contact the author.

I'm not super fond of these mixed figures. Bought the Victoria one and it required Vicky to be dialed in at 100 percent and it caused a problem every time I wanted to mix and match other male figures with him because it caused problems with whatever morph was used to flatten the chest. They should have just made a breastless male body. The body itself wasn't that different from the base male figure anyway.

These shapes works really well - https://www.daz3d.com/face-transfer-shapes-2-for-genesis-9
and are a great addition to Face Transfer 2.
Below is another FT2 creation using the above shapes.

sweet-talkin-melissa_26d96ec23c said:

While I do like this, since tweaking is always a thing, there are some issues I see pretty consistently. Overall, I see it as a good place to start if I want a look alike.
Eyes-Very rounded. Has a hard time picking up slants or even Asian eyes.
-I feel I tweak around the eyes a lot
Mouth- seems pretty good on the shape/outline, but it lacks depth most times.
Nose-squished often like the original face transfer.Voldemort face!
Chin-Flat face overall on many of these. 
-can easily go in and push chin depth or lip depth out/nose too. Nose shadows seem to affect the nose shape. 
Texture- uses more than the original (base color and translucency) and may be harder to get a better overall body skin color depending on the lighting in the photo. I want to try this with one of the g9 skin generators to see if I can mix it like before with a new texture and blend in the generated ones from this. Granted, I will likely need to do post-work. Most of this does not feel out of the box slap it on and bam! But I never expected it to be as it was not that way before. I'm missing the shapes add-on like the original had.
Overall, you REALLY need a good picture and good lighting. I'd say even more than the G8 version (old version). I had some characters with a little tweak and some that don't look like the picture at all. The face seems round and beefy, but the eyes don't pick up as well.  I felt like I had more control over the old model for g8 and could even use PBR with one click to make changes to the skin and blend the face texture and new skin together to match the body. One could also make changes to an image first, then run a transfer to reduce post-work.
This could benefit from another shape package like philw made for the original (Face transfer shapes). I've got most of the morph packs and feel like fixing flat face "depth" is not as bad. I've not tested the hair to see the hair bend issue yet, but I hope that can be fixed. 
It seems like it does well, or not so well. On the G8 version, I would generate a face and pull the texture into an art program (Gimp/beFunky/photoshop if you use it) and clone the color around a blemish to fix hotspots or the darker side of the face. Naturally, you will have a light and a dark side. I've not personally had the easiest luck mirroring a good side and lining it up, but heard someone else mentioning it. I also used the PBR on click product or skin details (Zev0). I've used the new face gen for G9 and do not like the textures, but I love the morphs and can use both. So for me at least, it's a combination of which tool to use and when to use it.
I also got hair bent when doing a quick render and adding a g9 hair. This is one of the best ones.

Totally agree with your observations. Eyes seems to be a very difficult thing always, and it is the most important part of the face

Example scene render with the recent Genesis 9 character created with Face Transfer 2 and its shapes.

StarLabz said:

So dissapointed in the new Face Transfer 2....  Here are the reasons why.

 

From the product it states:

Face Transfer 2 is an AI-powered system that from a photo transfers face shape, texture, and tone to create a look-a-like 3D version of family members, yourself, really whomever you want!

Answer:  Really??  What AI?  I have used the Face Transfer to the other FACE SHOP on here and there are barely any improvements.  For example the faces still come out FLAT, OVER SIZED, and OUT OF PROPORTION....  Real AI recognizes these facial changes, so if AI was used then i dont see it at all.  The cheeks/chin/forehead/ear locations do not represent the actual picture used.  Even the size of the inner face to the outer does not line up correctly.  JUST LIKE, FACE SHOP, i beleive it must line up points on the face like the lips and the like and just arrange it on the mesh, BUT does not respect the proportions AT ALL.

THE ONLY improvement, is the so called additions were you can load it on an a selected body morph, BUT BEWARE you have to make sure that body morph is in line with the original height (shoulders) with the BASE G9....  If not you get a stretched neck, and the head appears where the original G9 base head was....  WOW!

FROM AD: It is compatible with Genesis 9 figures, employs higher-resolution texture maps, refines the image projection process, and improves dynamic geometry adjustments.

ANSWER:  LOL, right.....  IT uses the base Genesis 9 Fem 2 base textures to overlay the LITTLE BIT of face it takes from the picture you provided.  WOW... again i feel soooo dissapointed here and bit ticked off that i paid $35 for this product.  AGAIN there is really no difference from the original and the other software Faceshop, besides the fact you can use it on G9 and it allows to place it on a body you decide to dail in, again with the caviat of being the same height as the origianl G9.

I feel ripped off to be honest.  You are basically paying for just those two features alone: Being able to place it on G9, and used on a correct height figure.

WHY cant we use other High RES textures to be used with the generation???  Havent tried to go to where it pulls the ONLY texture it uses (G9 Fem 2 base textrues from the Essintials), and replace them (renaming them) with a seperate texture like from bluejaunte or HID, or the like.

It would have been an improvement if we could use any texture set we chose but instead we are stuck with ONE....

AGAIN, there is absolutely NO REAL (Especially AI) improvement here using/buying this product...

agree. And I wish someone could move the system of "FaceBuilder add-on for Blender" to Daz... in my opinion that is the best photo-to-3D algorithm so far. It allows using pictures from different angles and the post-generation adjustment is super cool

info_b3470fa520 said:

PoliceArtist2 is a library of 120 shapes (noses, chins, creases, etc) that can be loaded via DAZ Studio’s MorphLoader

I'm not sure I understand why it's being distributed this way rather than as ready to use morphs.

Morph files both avoid the copyright issues of distributing OBJ files (OBJ files necessarily contain DAZ's copyrighted G9 topology, morph files just store vertex deltas) and avoids every individual user having to go through the manual process of loading and saving these shapes (as unless saved out to the library, the morphs will be stored in each scene file they're used in and bloat file sizes).

A shape product that comes with a reference guide is a good idea (the number of times I've had to dial in things called "Nose Shape 02" or the like to find out that, no, it's not the shape I need), but I don't understand why it's being distributed as OBJs rather than morphs.