Looks good now to get it into game

May I suggest lo-deffing the end result a bit, so it doesn't jump out of the gui (whatever its final appearance will be) so much. If the image is grayscale it can be easily coloured to fit the overall interface. Leaving the colours up to the player's imagination helps to alleviate the lack of endless variety in skin, eyes, hair etc.

The end result could be something like this (tint + overlay would be added in game).

I like what you've done to it, though I'm not sure the overlay should totally remove the colour of the image. I was thinking to maybe allow 70-80% of the image to show?

Really good though!

A great start, but if I may say so, the guy looks far too young like a twelve year old with some stubble 😉 (perhaps its a smoothing effect or something?)

But the concept is oh so sound.

Cavefish's mockup seems to solve that problem however it would be nice to have some colour in the images.

The smoothness is present in the original photo so there's not much I can do about that (I will look into it though) It would be very difficult to find a more suitable photo I'm afraid, so if the guys apparent age bothers people, then hopefully the overlay will sort it out. I'll do some experiments with that too, maybe make some animated giffs or something.

I'm hoping to free some time tonight or tomorrow to really get started on it 🙂

btw if you're wondering where the original pic came from, it's here-

http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/durchschnittsgesichter/durchschnittsgesichter.htm

I can see no trace of copyright associated with the images sooooo they're....probably ok to use 😉

If anybody can find better images to work from then let me know now

Ah yes, this is a good approach. Somewhat similar to the Transport Tycoon way of doing it. They have a hi-res replacement for that, which - with suitable modifications to clothing - could be an option (not sure on licensing) but it's available here:

http://jupix.info/openttd/gfxdev-repo/i ... file&id=68

(log in with guest/guest)

I'm not sold on the 'realistic' look for faces. It's personal preference but I always prefer a bit of stylization in a game to match the not-realistic-looking representation of the rest of the game.

Why don't we use our own faces for fun? Or would that be too crap?

You could use my face, if you really want everyone to become violently nauseous the first time they play. 😎

Well I think it would be hilarious running illegal goods only to see your own face turn up as the dodgy trader 😆 Perhaps with an eyepatch or something hehe.

Although it might be hard to get parts from one face to line up nicely with parts from another face, I don't doubt that it can be accomplished.

If your interested in trying this with some real faces, I would happily donate my face 😉 Just make sure I can have it back when your done with it /bad joke.

Shenle also reluctantly said he would donate his face 😉

Anyone else?

Edit// So I personally think the best way to do it would be a combination of FFE and Frontier Elite2 techniques.

Realistic faces from FFE but with the Identikit ability from FE2.

Perhaps we could even animate them too...? But that might be difficult to do and still keep the identikit options available.

Well, what I'm doing now will result only in static images, which personally I would be happy as I hated seeing those damn, terrible acting video clones.

I mean, I'm ready to go with what I've started but there's no poing me putting the effort in if nobody wants it. Sooooo is this a no go then?

It would also be pretty tough to implement our own faces, but we could throw in a few whole photos of ourselves that would turn up extremely rarely hehe

Thanks for the support! It'll probably take quite a bit of time if I'm to include clothing and hair (argh the hair could be very tough) and accessories, such as glasses, visors, earrings etc..

For me, I'm confident it'll look really good, but if somebody can offer up a better solution then that's fantastic. All these ideas are good but only if there's somebody willing to actually make it happen. For now, I am offering this solution, so are there any takers?

Remeber also that the finished result will be a lot more impressive than my initial test pics at the top.

Some really great thoughts here. I did some research on the internet and found this interesting page:

http://www.facegen.com/modeller.htm

I know that this one is not for free but it is funny anyways to play around with the "generate another" button 😉

However, this shows another problem. It is like it was in those games like oblivion: Once you have seen 5 faces you recognize that they all look very similar.

Cool program that. Might have a play at the weekend with some family photos.

That prog does look really good.

I've used something similar in the past with an EA sports game to get my face on a characer.

You have the right idea thats for sure, but what I meant before was why not simply apply your procedure to real pictures, instead of generated ones?

Here's a very quick example using real pictures to show what I mean:

I cut out eyes, mouth, nose and hair from the original pic and made 2 variations of each giving a fair few different combinations.

So I assume its the same procedure that you used, except done to a real photo?

Since we all have real faces 😉 why not use them instead of faked ones? Plus it is in-line of the overall hilarity from the old FFE videos 🙂

Anyway what do you reckon Subzeroplainzero.. Do you think your procedure could be applied to some real photos as effectively as you have already applied it to the pregenerated one?

I see what you mean, but the whole set of generated images will still have to come from a single original image as it would cause a tremendous amount of problems in trying to align them properly. I don't mean to be rude but my example was a very quick attempt too and I know which I prefer.

The benifit of my "borrowed" image is that it is very simple, plain and adaptable. If I used an image of me or you, the results would always have traces of our appearance in it, as if the universe is full of slightly inbred subzeroplainzero or s2odan clones.

Please don't be offended though, you're a very dashing chap 😉

Don't worry I'm not offended 🙂

I checked that site and it turns out that the pic you are using was in-fact generated from some-ones face:

Or at the very least its a very similar one.

So there's got to be a way of using all of our faces as opposed to some unknown person's or generated face....?

I suppose we would need the software though to create some 'averaged' faces of our own.

Yeh it's an "average" face generated from some 32 seperate people useing some form of voodoo magicI I assume. That's what I believe makes it a good base to work with. The nly problem is that the skin has been smoothed out a tad too much in the process. Makes them look a little young and fake perhaps, but hey! plastic surgery is cheap in the future! Its like getting a haircut.

That would be amazing if we could somehow create an average from all the pioneer fans though sadly....probably.. maybe.. perhaps.. not going to happen 🙁

Anyway, I think with the right overlay, it will look pretty good. I'm just waiting for Tomm to give me the nod. Afterall, he's the one who'll have to do the programming to get it in the game, and there may be certain specifications he'll need such as dimensions and resolutions etc.

<> Wait! I managed to hack into everybody's webcams and created an average of us all! Here it is-

Hey, that last guy looks like me... about 20 years ago. Except he has shorter hair - a LOT shorter hair. They called them the crazy '80s for a reason. 😀

😆 😆

That wasn't my intention! I promise! 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 ...or was it?

You still sure you want my picture? 😀

Well Subzeroplainzero, I think you have the go-ahead! Just do it and have fun. I still like the idea of a Haptek People Putty-like 3D avatar. Even if somebody makes one, the work you do could be used for the textures on the heads. Haptek characters are cool because you can make just about anything and they have built-in and easy to add animations. They breathe and blink and look around and lip- sync while reading text files. You could also animate your heads with Ms-agent type technology, but that's a boatload of work to do because you need to make each intermediate frame like a cartoon. Anything you come up with will be most welcome. It's bound to be better than a mis-tuned analog TV set!

Btw, here's what my Hal looks like now. I changed the appearance here by removing the hair and putting in a texture I found on the web. It can look like anything. Sometimes it looks like a frog!

s2odan, your three pics show a very interesting aspect about the whole thing here: what really makes people looking unique are the eyes (and the part around them). the eyes are the most significant part of a person's face. When looking at your three pictures i see two persons: The first in picture 1 and the second in picture 2 and 3, just with a different haircut. Actually the nose is different too, but on first sight i did not recognize that.

So if we really want to have different and recognizable persons in pioneer (so you can come back to a starport and say: i have seen this guy before!) we need to find a way to randomize the eyes and the region of a face around them.

Right! well it'll at least be a decent placeholder until something better comes along. I'd love to see haptek style people too, but it would be a huge amount of coding and whatnot to implement it, and right now there are far more important things for Tomm and co to be working on. I'm afraid that animation would be massively tricky on my method though, as the images will be made up of seperate "slits" that will be selected randomly. I'm not sure how that would work to be honest.

loving your texture application too! so you're the new capt Jameson then are you? 😆

Actually I found the same about the eyes. In my three pics at the start of the thread, I feel that the first one is far more different to the second two. This is because his eyes are a lot more seperated than the others. My main limitation however will be the actual shape of the head, as if I alter the edges of each section at all, they will no longer slot together cleanly. It should allow for enough variation though to give the impression that they are different people, especially after hair, clothing and glasses etc are added.