If you aren't a facegen user, this question will most likely not interest you at all.
I'm hoping to find out from someone who has purchased facegen customizer whether it will allow you to make working morph targets for figures such as Victoria 2 and 3.
From what i've read on the SI website, that sounds like what it does, but it's such a expensive and obscure program i'm having problems finding anyone who has bought the thing; what I THINK i'm reading is that you can take any head mesh, say vickie 2's, and convert it into facegen format, which would allow you to then use the (truly incredible) photofit feature of facegen modeler to create a spot-on morph for anyone you had a decent picture of.
It costs too much for me to believe anything their sales staff might say; any users out here?

Message edited on: 11/09/2005 04:09

Attached Link: http://www.facegen.com

Singular Inversions get a credit on the Poser start up screen so its reasonable to assume that is what is driving the Poser Face Room. So yes if you are prepared to pay the money you can get to put similar functionality into your own models.

I see the most facegen talk here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/3d_celebrities/ A number of members use it very well.

Whoa. FaceGen is a part of Poser as the FaceRoom? Amazing! I need to experiment with the face room. :D btw, I don't think the face room supports the Unimesh figures. Just P5, P6, and Miki. Koji and Apollo are supposed to be coming soon. bB

Thanks for the input, folks; I'll keep looking for someone who has the software. BastBlack, I know P5 has facegen incorporated into the face room for the don/judy characters, but I have no idea about P6. It's really, really limited in comparison to facegen stand-alone, though.

Hi. The attached image may help to better visualize the results you can get with Facegen and the Customizer. In this image I have pre-fitted the DAZ David head, neck, left and right eyes, and teeth to the default Facegen mask. NOTE that I did not take the time necessary to make a perfect fit to the mask as this was only an initial trial run. The first portion of the image on the left shows the default Facegen head and a dialog with options to select other models. In this case I am loading the customized DAZ David, which is shown in the top middle image. If I'd taken the time to do a perfect fit I would have had to round out the jaw a bit (it's too close to square in this case). In particular, note the base of the neck. When you run your face through the customizer, you select some base vertices in the head or neck that will remain in a fixed position and will not morph with the customization settings. This is very important, because when you then load this model back into Poser as a morph target, these vertices must remain in the exact same location as the original head or you will end up with breaks in the mesh. On the top right image, I have simply pushed the generate button to generate a random image. The options you can obtain from this are far superior and faster, in my opinion, than dialing new morph targets within Poser. On the bottom middle image I have taken a side and front image from a Farscape tv show fan site of the primary character John Crighton (actor Ben Browder) and applied the images through Facegen photofit to the DAZ head. Do some searches on the web and you will see that the resemblance is _very_ close, though not exactly spot on (again, mainly due to the fact that I did not take the time necessarily to properly fit the model to the Facegen mask). On the bottom right image, I have taken a side and front photo of a friend and used photofit to apply to the DAZ head. This shows the results that can be obtained with a wider head and jawline. In particular note how the vertices at the base of the neck (previously specified as fixec vertices during facegen customization) do not move at all. Each of these customized heads can then be imported as morph targets. Now, importing these new faces as morph targets can be tricky at first. To fit the DAZ David face to the facegen mask, I first imported the model into 3DS Max and did my fitting. Now, since I wanted to morph the head, neck, left and right eyes and teeth all as one object, I then had to group the objects together in Max and then save them as a single .obj file (rather than individual .obj files for each portion of the figure). I then imported this single .obj into Facegen customizer. Note also that by doing so the scale did change as the Poser scale is much to small to work with in 3DS Max (I basically imported the model in at 100 times the original Poser model scale). This means that I can not simply export the heads from FaceGen to a .obj and then try to apply those directly to the Poser model inside Poser, for two reasons. First, at 100x the original Poser scale, the head would explode. Not a pretty sight. Second, the .obj file exported from Facegen is a single head object, and you can only apply morph targets from the specific object containing the exact same number of vertices. So to take these heads into Poser I must first save them to a .obj file inside Facegen, load that .obj into 3DS Max and then apply these as a morph target to a grouped version of the head, neck, eyes and teeth in 3DS max (so that each individual element gets the appropriate morph). I then save each component out to a separate .obj file (one for the head, one for the neck, one for each eye, one for the teeth) and upon the export reduce the scale to .01 so that they fit back to the original Poser scale. So, no, it isn't exactly a straightforward process. It does take time and it is easy to make mistakes in the import/export and model grouping processes. But once it is done, it is a lot more powerful, and you can end up with morphs that very very closely resemble a live person.