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

Did you purchase Headshop through the Daz Store?    If you did you can get Tech support.

I recently installed daz 3d and purchased headshop 9.2. I installed it and as soon as I launch the headshop software in the edit menu it crashes with the following message: 

“Headshop closed before it could create the necessary files …”

Has anyone else had this issue? Can't get tech support from Daz as it is an addon and no response from abalone llc.

Rick

I have things working and looking good until I go to export. It says it successfully exported, but then I get an error message

"Headshop Directory "fs" could not be created because the selected figure does not have a valid runtime folder."

I've tried Genesis 2 and 3. I've only used files as they install, so I haven't moved folders or anything.

It was an analogy... analogies are imperfect. It was making a point in response to a specific point. It wasn't an attempt to be a 1:1 equation. 
If I buy a simple mobile game that costs $.99 and is real intuitive, I don't expect instructions or a tutorial. If I pay $60 for a new console or PC game... I expect more than being thrown into it to try and figure out how to equip my weapon or site my target or ride that dragon or... whatever... 
If you're selling content by a non-English speaking author... say, LAMH - and it is expensive, and there are no English instructions or tutorials... well... that isn't exactly a fair business practice. I'm picking on LAMH because the author is not a native English speaker and the documentation is actually pretty good. 
Now... the RV may not be as complex as LAMH or Headshop Oneclick... and it is what I'm picking on right now but there is a LOT of content like this... if it has features that are shown in the promos, it should be documented in clear English if it is being sold on an English speaking website. That is just ONE of the QA issues I've encountered lately... and more and more this seems to affect the latest generation when it wasn't as big of a problem on Gen1, 2 and 3 products. 
Let's use toys as an example... if I paid $300 for a Lego Millenium Falcon and I opened it up and it was a box of plastic bricks with no instructions... "You can build it with these pieces, but it is up to you to figure out how to..." 
I do think that is something that would get a toy manufacturer in some sort of hot water. I'm going to be less upset if it isn't clear how to make the action lights and sounds work on the $20 Batmobile I bought my kid at Walgreens. Although... cheap toys aren't very cheap anymore... are they... 
 

You can also blend a little of a Headshop morph dial and a little of a FaceGen morph dial to better get an accurate morph of your subject. But another limitation of Headshop is that you can't use GenX to transfer Headshop morphs from generation to generation... where FaceGen supports Gen1, 2 and 3 characters *and* the Morphs will transfer using GenX. It really is the best product, even if it isn't perfect, for doing this kind of work. 

So, I started with DAZ on an i5 with a 2GB Nvidia 750ti... Iray renders could take 24 hours to run 10,000 samples. Now I've got an i7 with a 1070 with 8GB of memory, and renders that took 4 or 5 hours take about 15 minutes. Here is the thing... I've seen renders that are photorealistic and beautiful done on way less powerful machines using less powerful cards in 3Delight. There is an argument that Iray makes you lazy, and I wouldn't deny that. With lighting, shaders, and scene setup, you can achieve results that are at least equal to Iray with 3Delight - and you're going to learn a lot more about the DAZ rendering engine. I bought and tried Reality with LUX too... and that generates some incredible results with the right scene and lighting, too. Someone here on the forums used to have the signature, "I use Iray because I am lazy." There is truth to that. If you've got more money than time, use Iray. If you've got more time than money, throw yourself into those other engines and enjoy your results. But... part of that is realizing that certain tools lend themselves better to certain render engines, and I think Facegen is absolutely geared toward creating the best results in Iray. One of the most frustrating parts of Iray is that things look so much different in the preview "texture shaded" viewport than they do when rendered in Iray. There are times when I love the texture shaded preview and Iray washes out all the details that made that the case. Figure expressions tend to be the biggest example of this. You see dimples and creases and other things in 3Delight that disappear in Iray, and what seems the perfect pose and likeness looks completely different in the final Iray render. Iray gives good results quickly... but GREAT results still take craft, patience and artisty no matter what render engine you use. 
As for using Facegen with non-neutral expressions - the application doesn't know how to streach something like an open mouth over the base Genesis 1, 2 or 3 figure right when creating the textures. It is trying to overlay the morph and textures it creates over a default genesis figure. If I have a non neutral base picture I am trying to convert using FaceGen, I actually go in with Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and try and ERASE the expression as pre-work before putting it into FaceGen... and often that is enough. Take out the upturned corners of a smile and put the top lips and bottom lips together with no gap... and FaceGen does a good job. Leave the smile there and you get these alien distortions where the lips are peeled back and the teeth are now the closed lips. Does that make sense? It assumes that what appears in the picture is a neutral expression... so if there are teeth where the lips should be, the teeth become the lips, and a horror show morph and skin texture results that will give your subject nightmares if you show them the final result. 
I also have Headshop Oneclick... and it is TERRIBLE... but if you can get it for less than $10... sometimes letting HEADSHOP make the morph and FaceGen make the textures will result in a better likeness overall than either can achieve on their own. But Headshop is really, really awful. The textures are terrible - it only scans the face and tries to fade/blend it into a normal Genesis skin, which ends up making it look like the face texture is painted on another body... If you can't cover it with hair, it looks like a figure has skinned your subject and is just wearing their face ala - Silence Of the Lambs. It crashes more often than it works, too. Literally, $10 is too much to pay for it... but, on the other hand, if you pay $10 for Headshop, you'll realize why FaceGen is worth $50-$80 on discount... so there is that. :) 

i cant get head shop to run it on my mac it gets so far then posts a message headshop failed to create files before it closed 

any ideas

Purchased headshop - thought installed correctly - will not show in Edit Menu?   Anyone able to explain how come? I lead it to the right install path on my computer.....thanks for any help.  

I recantly installed headshop for windows.  It works until I try to export it.  I was told that DAZ was having some problems with headshop but if I load a cr2 figure it will work.. Ok how do I do that?

If anyone out there knows can give me instuctions on how to load a cr2 figure into daz PLEASE HELP!

I recantly installed headshop for windows.  It works until I try to export it.  I was told that DAZ was having some problems with headshop but if I load a cr2 figure it will work.. Ok how do I do that?

If anyone out there knows can give me instuctions on how to load a cr2 figure into daz PLEASE HELP!

The issue is resolved, it had to do with the right on the Mac. You need to reboot into safe mode command +r and alter the rights csrutil disable in terminal. After that I rebooted and my headshop works now.

I am also running into the same issue and getting the error message regarding Headshop closed before it... What can I do the resolve it? I tried al before mentioned actions but it does not resolve the issue.

HeadShop 10.2  Custom face morphs from Photo's. OK, I have HeadShop 10.2 working great with no problems exporting the custom morph to Genesis 2 Male or Female in the DAZ Studio Scene but how do I transferee the head morphs from Genesis 2 to Genesis or Genesis 3 ? I can save the custom morphed Genesis 2 Figure and reload it , the Morph shows up in the Parameters Tab, under, Morphs, FaceShop, fs. and you can adjust the slider to change the face shape but when I try to use GenX 2 to transfure the face shape the morph does not showup.

I have GenX 2 with Genesis 1- 2 and 3 plugins. Is there something else I need ?

So my question is how do I move custom face morphs created with HeadShop 10.2 to other versions of Genesis ?  

I see... Thanks. Does Headshop do a better job if you don't take the textures?

Thanks a lot,

Me

@donovancolbert, my view is that if you don't like a particular aspect of a character that for sale, say it plainly; for example, if you don't like the shape of the face and lips, say it exactly that way. If the next character is the same way, don't repeat yourself and give them time to change how they're doing them, since they may already have another character in testing.

I don't disagree at all, here. But I'm also saying, some people aren't going to know WHAT it is about 3D Universe or FW or Sabby characters (or what they DO like, for that matter...) but they're still going to express their opinions that they think the characters are cute, or sexy, or unrealistic, or ugly, or whatever it is that they get from those character lines. I picked those 3 because all 3 of them seem to be very successful, very popular PAs who still get a lot of vague, general criticism for their products.
And of course, there is more than just characters. Not all sets or utilities are created equal - and often this is where I find my biggest disappointments. When I feel cheated by the promos or the description, that is where I am most likely to be brutally critical. I think the price for Headshop OneClick is way overpriced when it is discounted to 50% off. It overpromises, under-delivers, crashes, and just generally disappoints. If it were being given away for free on ShareCG, it wouldn't be the best FREE utility or plug-in available there. That is brutally critical. HeadShop OneClic deserves the criticism. 

Saving grace for HeadShop... 
Sometimes using HeadShop to create the face morph and FaceGen to create the skin maps makes a good combination that might be more true to the source material. But the HeadShop morphs are harder to work with than the FaceGen morphs (transferring to diffferent genreations using GenX2, for example, seems impossible with HeadShop.) 
FaceGen does a GREAT job of taking the face texture and extrapolating it to the entire skin map. 

I purchased Headshop OneClic for about $15 and I think that was about $10 too much for it. It is a terrible product, mostly because it only creates a texture of the FACE which doesn't actually blend into the head, let alone the rest of the base model body. 
FaceGen Pro is light-years ahead of Headshop in this regard - and the version I have does a decent job even from marginal photographs. Cleaning up the source image in Photoshop can help. The morphs - generally I find that if I only dial them up to about 65-75% they look best - and they're never PERFECT... but when you go from a neutral expression to ANY other expression - you're dealing with musculature and bone structure and individual nuance that it is impossible for a 3D modelling program to accurately mimic, at least at this point. 
Most of the "character" of a FaceGen map does come from the skin map textures that FaceGen generates... but the truth is, take ANY character morph, and change the skin map, and it will radically change the entire character. Michael 7 wearing Leo 7s skin maps or Dale using Lee's skin - whatever. The skin map creates a LOT of the character. 
It is a good base to start off at, at the very least, and probably the best tool out there to get you started if you're trying to accurately recreate real people. 
The OTHER advantage I see with it - you get REAL and believable every day characters with FaceGen. You still have to work on the body with morphs to add imperfections - but in general, MOST of the models you're going to buy or see for free are very idealized examples of the human form - even most of the old characters like Abel and Opel are GOOD LOOKING old people. 
FaceGen brings the beauty meter down below 11 - so if you want renders that aren't completley populated by incredibly good looking people but instead with some average looking faces - it is a good place to start. 

There's HeadShop One-Click. Admittedly, I haven't used it in a long time, mostly because I like FaceGen infinitely more. When I last used HeadShop, it only generated textures for the face, so you'd be left dealing with adjusting other textures for the torso, legs, arms, etc. Maybe it's a lot better now, but I haven't tested it recently.