Poser comes with a wonderful feature that has the potential to make models look more lifelike...so why do so few people seem to use it?

I've been amazed when I'm creating a character to see what a huge difference asymmetry makes in "breathing life" into a figure.

In short, asymmetry rocks.

Thank you for your time--this has been a public service announcement.

Message edited on: 03/26/2005 10:45

A scientific study showed that the more symetric a face is, the more healthy and beautiful the person was. People with more symetric faces had all sorts of advantages in life, more money, better jobs, longer life, and over-all better health. So an ideal person would have a perfectly symetrical face. I suppose when people are doing pretty people for their gallery, symetry aids in the beauty of their character.

That's an interesting response, and it makes sense...unfortunately. To me, the beauty and interest in people lies in their individuality. Though I am just as prone to fascination with physical beauty as anybody else, I still find that the majority of Poser figures in the galleries are not "beautiful"...simply lifeless. Look at the actor Luke Wilson, he is considered to be a handsome man...yet what an irregularly shaped nose he has. Even great beauties do not exhibit perfect symmetry in their faces.

.... so why do so few people seem to use it? Because many of them probably don't even know about the Split Morph function.

Little dragon, what IS the "split morph" function?? I've been creating asymmetry through use of the P5 dials that only morph one side of the face. Also in the face room, there are dials that rotate features along an axis, in order to create asymmetry. Is the "split morph" function yet another way to create asymmetry?

Ahh .. Face room ... I think that is one reason you don't see it more. Not that many people use Don and Judy and not that many people use the face room. The split morph is another way to do it with figures that have morphs. You can click on the dial and there is a little arrow to the right and use it to split the morph so you can frown right and left if you didn't have that option before.

And it'll work on any morph with bilateral symmetry, not just head morphs or facial expressions. I've used it to split chest and abdomen morphs, for instance.

The study I saw didn't make any correlation between health and facial symmetry. Instead, test subjects were shown various paintings of faces, and they ranked the most symmetric as the most beautiful. This is a natural result, since all the people that the subjects see in real life have asymmetric faces. Studies like this are usually tied in with eugenics and theories from the 19th century, which tried (and failed) to associate head shape with various characteristics or tendencies.

I saw a rather detailed hour long show about physical beauty and atttractiveness on one of the Discovery channels which DID make those correlations. In fact, one rather facinating part of the study was that they had 4 men with varying degrees of facial symmetry wear a tee shirt for 12 hours. They then gave the tee shirt to some women for them to rate the smells on an "attractveness scale. Interestingly enough, the shirts the women liked the most belonged to the men with the most symmetric faces. Pretty wild. On the other hand, the show pointed out that PERFECT symmetry is vauglely unsetteling to most people. We seem to instinctivly know that perfect symmetry is impossible and therefore looks 'unreal'. I wish I could remember the name of the show.

Something else to consoder.. when you model, creating morphs for a symmetrical figure is MUCH easier then for a figure that's lost it's symmetry. I can select mirrored points in lightwave symmetry mode, but without symmetry, I have to try to select every single point by hand, and if I miss one, the morph might have to be redone.

It is/was a Discovery Health Channel three-part series on attractiveness called "Sex Signs".

pookah69, great topic, one crucial to my own thinking.

Happily, both with left/right morphs one can purchase and the ability to make morps L/R and as pointed out above the Split Morph function, there is no reason to leave the model with mathematical perfect symmetry. Personally, I use Judy+EJ, giving me a face with hundreds and hundreds of morphs; i can dial in just about any shape and asymmetry I wish. My favorite asymmetry dial is "NoseHook".

But, as you pointed out, you see perfect symmetry everywhere in the world of Poser. Reasons:

1. a lot of users are beginners or uncreative
2. like a rat self-administering a shock to the pleasure nodes in the brain as wired in the lab, some users and the merchants chasing them will ONLY stay (as it were) right down the middle. They can detect any deviance away from perfect symmetry and they get turned off.

This syndrome is bio/evolutionary driven, IMO. There is a powerful sex impulse behind it. Now, in reality, NO human has this perfection, but the ones who come close (or surgically morph their face close) are glorified in the culture. Meanwhile, Poser users who are addicted to this look CAN get 'perfection' and see NO reason do dial it back in any way.

I have had numerous comments anytime I show my renders of people with asymmetry, like "gag" and "not realistic" and most often "does not do it for me." No problem, I DO feel uneasy about that whole hyper-perfection syndrome, but it's a free world.

One of the big reinforcement loops is that the merchants create these 'character paks' for Victoria with a few facial structures moved around a little, but careful not to break left/right symmetry, and post preview renders of these models. These sell becuase of the sex impulse built in. The users create 'gallery images' from them, verbatim. They get a lot of hits and praise. This becomes the glorified orthodoxy. The merchants soon learn that if they deviate, sales fall way off. The 'look' gets more and more narrow.

Anyway....there is a deeper impluse in humans, a more mature sexuality that comes from adoring a loved-one's face BECAUSE the person is loved for his/her individuality, character and acts. Glad you are contributing to that.

Do you have any images you wish to post here as example?

::::: Opera :::::

'Jimmy', below, is based on a friend of mine, but was not created in the face room or with a photograph of Jimmy. It is purely a 'normal' white male texture with strong bump map and displacement in the material room, and Real Skin Shader. Underlying model: Judy with EJ morphs.

Yes, excellent and interesting thread, pookah, thanks. I saw a bit of one documentary about facial features narrated by John Cleese and at one point they showed Liz Hurley as an example of "the face" that we respond positively too. It had too do with certain ratios of the distance between the eyes, between the eyes and the mouth, etc. (not endorsing the theory, just repeating it. But it certainly works for me in the case of Liz!) Opera's comments are very interesting, and I am particularly impressed by the guy and girl at the top of his examples. The girl is sweet-looking, and the guy has total "real character and personality," reminds me a bit of Mo Rocca in his "Ferris Bueler" days.... good job. I plead guilty to the Symmetry Trap, but have now resolved to find ways to introduce some randomness in my faces. If one works with V3 instead of Judy, and one is NOT a Master of Magnets, is there a way to introduce some asymetry? I usually try to vary the expression a bit (ie, make the eyes and sides of the mouth slightly different), but how about the underlying face morph? Thanks, LinkDink

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/softgood.ez?ViewSoftgood=35332

To work with asymmetry in V3, use the SplitMorph suggestion made by LittleDragon above.

I just went to the MarketPlace, went to Victoria3 and searched on 'faces' and got a LOT of products that tweak the features in an attempt to 'make a different face' but leave the left/right symmetry in place.

One vendor I feel attempts to put life into her V3 products is A_. Link to one of her products attached. I don't include this link with the idea that on buy or not buy 'faces' but just as an example of someone doing SOMETHING good. She injects some symmetry, but not enough (one hopes for her sales) to totally alienate the V3 market.

Also another issue in arriving at individuality...the texture. Sometimes the texture artist will build in SOME asymmetry by way of a birthmark or such on one side, and also if the texture is sourced from a photo, there will be differences of course, but they tend to fade out once you pull the camera back. However...the eyebrows...that is a challenge.

I have had to go in to several textures I liked and alter the eyebrows so they don't look identical to each other. And also, when posing, you have to make use of morphs under the brow to alter the 'set' of the eyebrows, both character to character, and expression to expression in the same character and even from left to right in the same pose!

::::: Opera :::::