Is it just with me, or is the Face Room in Poser ***horrible?  *** I can never get an accurate face in Poser when I load two photos, because there are not enough points and whenever you move one of them the entire face becomes  oddly deformed.  I have had this problem for years and I never think I got ONE accurate face reconstruction in Poser.

Does anybody think we should start an online petition or something to give to e-frontier to finally improve that Face Room?

yes i agree:P it should ave been better:)  especially for those Plain figures judy and don:P  and should be compatible w v2/3 etc:p  (i hope that happens some day):D even some improvement would make me happy:D:D:D so yes!! lets start!::D

grylin: i was hoping by now that more people would post on this thread so we can make this thing look presentable.  Do you know of a way we can further promote this cause?

hmmm,  i have no ideas yet .. :P  ill have a think .:) . but im sure  more ppl will agree, that  that pesky faceroom.lol.  needs imrovement:)

maybe another headline??:P like;attention! hehe    anyways, im of to  try to figure out  whut and how:):D

I think that the problem is that people either like the face room as it is (although, quite possibly, only in the absence of anything better), or just don't use it.   I agree that it needs improvement, especially expansion of its functionality, but I don't envisage that it will support DAZ figures any time soon.   The politics militate against that.   I have never tried to duplicate a real face with it, but I have tried to make Jessi look human and I had to admit defeat.

Which means that I support your campaign, but I'm not optimistic of success.   I suspect that it would be possible to advance dvdcdr's requirements, without responding to grylin's in any way - and I also suspect that that is the most likely result.

When it first came out folks complained and they have complained on and off since and they really don't care enough about their customers to fix it or they would have long ago. How long has 6 been out? And now they're talking about 7. Every time they say they will fix the obvious flaws, (the face room was one of the reasons I got P6), and they rarely do. Not too optimistic myself.

Quote - yes i agree:P it should ave been better:)  especially for those Plain figures judy and don:P  and should be compatible w v2/3 etc:p  (i hope that happens some day):D even some improvement would make me happy:D:D:D so yes!! lets start!::D

The company that used to own Poser wanted more money from DAZ than DAZ
was willing to pay to make the face room compatable with V3 and M3.
Now that DAZ has DAZ Studio they would be even less willing to fork
over the dough to let their products work in Poser.

I hardly ever use the face room.  But I did use it to create my avatar
from some photos of me a friend took.  I even got the head shape
to sort of resemble my head shape.  So it does work if you play
around with it, but it is too much work to be fun.

I like the face room, but haven't tried to make a face from photos though.

I've made Judy look "Human" heheh and I've done some great "Insane Faerie" faces as well...

I have a few examples in my gallery - one Judy and one Don which are pretty far from the original heads.

I would like to see improved functionality as you sugest - some kind of fine-tune controls and maybe teeth corrrection for when the mouth is squooshed etc.

But the way Koji and other figures are taking so long to be implimented, it's more likely that the face room is an outsourced element - if so, it might be worth tracking down the actual company that does it and ask them about their plans for upgrades and improvements THEN talk to EF about P7/8 improvement?

Cheers

i f the faceroom had v3,m3 compatable it would be wroth using.

http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1271886

I've tried a number of times to use photos in the face room and each time the result is crap. Now maybe that's my fault or the systems, who knows.

I would love to be able to load a photo in and have a character look like the photo, just think of the Revenge images I could do to people with that!!!   

Heheh, maybe THAT'S why it doesn't work - to avoid law suits!

Here's my first play with James in the P6 face room from a while back. Not too hard to get him looking different and non-freakish - his expressions still work fine also.

I think creating faces that look like celebs etc might be a fine art - I'm no good at it so I tend to just try and make the best face I can in a given session rather than limit the results by trying to match a real person. Remember that a lot of the time movie-stars are specially lit to bring out certain facial features which in the light of day may not be so prominent, so working off front and side-views etc may indeed get a correct structure, but still lack that "move star" quality you hoped to capture.

Anyway, that said, you should check out what Mogadeet does with his Daz figure morphs.

Cheers

Whoever is interested in making this happen, how are we going to go about doing this?  There is this website, http://www.petitiononline.com/petition.html, or we can try and do it within renderosity or something.

I personally wasn't trying to capture a movie star look. Mainly wanted to do the faces of the guys from my husband's band for a video I'm doing for them. Think I'll be able to do a better job with morphs in zbrush. Not everyone is star struck, some folks just want a different look for their character, and that's what was originally promised. I still agree with the first person in this thread on this one.

Whoever is interested in making this happen, how are we going to go about doing this?  There is this website, http://www.petitiononline.com/petition.html, or we can try and do it within renderosity or something.

Good luck with your petetion! If we can't get EF to release the Koji faceroom support that they promised us a year ago for Koji 1, I doubt that any online petition is going to affect faceroom support or improvements. The faceroom was made by somebody other than the folks who make Poser anyway.

DVDCDR...it's horrible!

I've been sitting here for 2 hours trying to make this fool thing work and I've got the rage spittle on my screen to prove it.

e-frontier should be ashamed of themselves but it's obviouse they just don't give a damn.

If they did they would have fixed it a long time ago.

It's crap and  to tell the truth, I'm sure glad I didn't shell out the dough for Poser6.

Look, if they got rid of the face room, I doubt they would charge any less for Poser.
But to make something really fantastic they would probably have to charge a lot
more.  A really good face mapping and sculpting program would cost hundreds
of dollars.
It's just some neat little gimmick that someone wll play with for a few hours and
never use again. 

I think the P5s work just fine in the face room. It's a wonderful tool for creating unique looking characters that don't have any stock look. It isn't quite as good for creating exact likenesses of individuals. That takes some modeling skills that can't be done in poser. I'm not happy at all with the P6s. They don't work well in the face room.

Okay, everyone.  I'm gonna try and get this petition going.  But first, there needs to be a statement at the beginning.  The main feature that I am requesting is better head reconstruction with photo references.  However, since all of us are Poser users and wish the Face Room could be better, I don't think the petition should be limited to that one improvement. 

Please post on this thread anything about the Face Room you would like to be improved (please avoid gramatical and spelling errors so it is easier for me to read) as quickly as possible and try and put it in bold type.   

I am most likely going to post this petition tomorrow in the early afternoon and after that it cannot be changed.  So tell me your ideas.

I encourage you guys tell me about your own issues with the Face Room, spread the word to other Poser users about this cause, and visit the thread afterwords so you can see the link to sign the petition.

Thank you.

PS-i'll post here before and after i create the petition.

Attached Link: Singular Inversions

The Face room, contrary to popular demand does not change the surface of a figure's facial geometry.  In other words you're not making 3D change/morph.  All you are doing is making a 2D texture to work on a figure.  If your figures facial features do not really match the person your trying to emulate, in smooth shaded mode(Without any texture,) because you haven't used any magnets or a modeler program, then all the Face room can do is a very good job coloring that over.

Although, the people that e-frontier lease the Face room from(Singular Inversions) do have a program that will make morphs from photos.  This program is know as Facegen, is located at the link above. and free a try once.   The resulting object is then Importable into Poser, but not into any figure(I know) as a morph.  I'm not even sure it has a body, or of you can pick up with it in the Face room.  Though the people I've spoken with at Singular Inversions did know to what I was referring when I mentioned Poser characters(but did seem lost when it came to Daz3D...)  So, I do know that there is some hope to making the objects compatible as Poser morphs, but(And here's a catch...) only with the purchase of yet another Singular invasions application known as Facegen Customizer.

This was all as of a couple years ago, when I first started getting serious with my first(Daz M2) figure.  I knew then I would be using M2 to learn much of Poser/  I then just decided to do what I'm still doing with V3, in waiting for Poser to bring actually incorporate Facegen and Cutomizer.  My guess is that e-frontier and singular invision just need time to get it together.  There is so much more of Poser to learn I figured I've had time to wait.  Now that I'm finally handy with magnets, and have begun work with a modeler, I'll still be holding the Face room at bay until I get through the Hair and Cloth rooms, but I can see where the Face room is a bit frustrating.  Especially with how it is just easy to expect it to do everything at first glance.

To dvdcdr

Before you set up the petition and start making big demands  you really need to research Singular Inversions and their Facegen products (as suggested above) so you understand what you CAN ask for in your Poser upgrade requests and what's an unrealistic demand.

In the forums here alone you need to research what is already known about the Face Room - Dr Geep has done some really good tutorials and introductory pieces:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=1686992&page=2#message_1695340

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2112286&page=2#message_2120304

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2695010&ebot_calc_page#message_2695010

This one specifically deals with the difficulties of making realistic faces based on photographs:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2473938

Cheers

Why Online Petitions Don't Work

You'd be better off emailing individual emails to eFrontier. It's much harder to ignore 500 individual mails than it is one petition which may or may not get there anyway and has probably been signed by a host of fictional characters, thus making it easy to discredit.

Quote - Why Online Petitions Don't Work

You'd be better off emailing individual emails to eFrontier. It's much harder to ignore 500 individual mails than it is one petition which may or may not get there anyway and has probably been signed by a host of fictional characters, thus making it easy to discredit.

Exactly. I told that to some people on another forum I post on.  1000 letters in a bag on the floor vs 1000 lines showing up in a virtual email box are completely different. And the point about spoofing the names is exactly true. They have no way of knowing if it's 1000 different people typing their name or 1 person typing 1000 names.

Why spam eF? Whether it be by petition, or by e-mail. I personally like the Face Room. I have also spent the better part of a couple of years working with it.

Is it perfect? No. Should it be? No, not if you like getting Poser at non-3DMax prices.

I have seen people complain about the Cloth Room, the Mat Room, the Face Room, etc. Well I don't know what to tell people. If Poser is such a bad product, then purchase Max or Maya or Rhino, or whatever. There are even great free tools like Blender if you want to go cheap.

People seem to forget what Poser is. It is not a modeller. It was originally created just to simulate a model for traditional art. However, each company that has owned it has added new features to it to make it more useful.

Is there room for improvement? Of course. Nothing is ever perfect. However, I think people are getting a bit overbearing demanding that every single feature be worthy of a package 10 times the price. Go price out FaceGen. Price out that Mac app that the shaders came from. Price out the app that Poser Fashion came from. All these tools are brought to you by eF in a cheap package compared to each individual piece.

Now I'm sure people will flame me to no end for this post, but maybe those people should try taking a step back for a second. Like I said, if Poser is not "good enough" for you, price out packages that do what you want. Then decide if the learning curve for those packages is even remotely feasable to your time.

Some people see it as the owners of Poser not paying attention to their customers. Well, I for one feel like they are paying attention to me. They are giving me a low-cost solution to creating artwork for my own pleasure. They aren't trying to give me the next Max or Maya.

Yep, I'm with destro75 on this one - the only real issues Poser needs to address are basic functionality problems like lack of multiple undos, the memory leak issues and render crashes.

An in-built Mat file maker would be good and the ability to save partial poses wouldn't go astray either, heheh. (if I'm missing this functionality in P6 please point me at it!)

Regarding the face room - I agree that Poser marketing shouldn't make any big claims about the ability to recreate realistic human heads from two photos in the face room - that sort of thing creates unrealistic expectations. Photogrammetry and similar processes are a long way off being perfect at the moment. From my experience the Face Room is exellent for creating "non-stock" looking faces for supported figures, so in that sense it isn't "broken" it just needs practice and adjusted expectations.

Cheers

Thanks to Karen aswell, for educating me as to what spamming is (on the other thread dvdcdr started) the last time i had encountered spamming was on the school playground, where if you had combed your hair back, someone would come up, slap you on there forehead, and shout "SPAM" (LOL) so now i know it's not the same thing then!!

oh god.
the face room is shoddy, regurgitated software - it used to be 'facegen modeler', and ive used the program in its standalone form years before poser 5 was even a rumor.

please, for the love of god do not petition e-frontier about this. the last thing poser needs is more attention diverted from the core software into bull@$#% addons like the face room. the main thing we need in poser 7 is a reworked rigging system so that finally figures can actually raise their arms above their heads and bend their knees without looking inhuman. at this point we have photorealistic characters, textures, hair, clothing and a decent renderer with raytracing.... what we dont have is even remotely human joints. daz and every independant merchant has been bending over backwards for the last decade trying to compensate for the crappy rigging system in poser by adding extra body groups, extensive JCMs, cr2 hacks, etc. its a huge PITA. the main thing holding back poser realism right now is character rigging... which is supposed to be the main focus of the program.

i fail to see why people insist on more rubust modeling capabilities in poser. poser is not zbrush, poser is not lightwave or 3ds or maya. if you want a modeler or a morphing application then go buy one. silo2 will have symmetrical morphing, displacement mapping and a full modeling suite and you can get it right now for $100 -- it blows away any sortof modeling or morphing capability that poser has or ever will have. poser is primarily a posing and animation application, with a renderer thrown in the mix. stop trying to coerce the program into some sortof 'jack of all trades' dream-application that does everything -- ultimately all it will end up as is a program that does everything but sucks at everything. even a program like 3ds max doesnt do what you people are expecting from poser without plugins and addons, and it costs $4000 and has well over a decade of development by a large team of professional programmers and developers.

but of course, as usual, why doesnt everyone ask e-frontier for features like global illumination, a physics engine, a complete modeling suite, UV unwrapping, and why not throw in mental ray as well.

who needs a better rigging system, right?

Actually this isn't true. You have a whole load of morphs for creating custom heads and faces in the Face Room including race, age and gender morphs - certainly in P6 anyway. I think it's the photo texture creation that is somewhat limited and difficult to use, but it is possible. I don't know how FaceGen works, but it seems unlikely that face geometry is created by simply importing a photo - perhaps in a limited way based on front and side elevation contours. In Poser6 you can affect model geometry at rendertime using displacement maps, but this introduces a whole other level of creative skills and required apps.

You arn't neccessarily going to get fantastic close-up render results with the P6 Face Room texture creator; you really need to create your textures in an external app using seam guides for this. But I have found it more than adequate for designing characters (only with the EF stock figures of course). See pic - a Faceroom character using James (expressions also created or modified using the faceroom and then saved as morph targets).

good comment on this, blackhearted!

i copy and paste...

I'm not saying I'm upset so much that it doesn't work as much as they touted it as one of the main features of the program, along with new animals that were supposed to come in poser 6, which never showed up. Don't try to come off with the free items they kicked down to us later because they do not look more realistic...they are cartoon figures. I'm just still a bit upset at the way they have handled and continue to handle this program. I am giving up on poser except for jobs that are simple that I need done quickly. My husband bought Maya for me and I start my classes later this month. I don't think a petition will do any good, I don't think 1000 letters witll do any good. They know what we think because everyone already complained about it. Unchecking this thread as a lost cause.

copy and paste where?
in the poser7 beta forum i hope :)

CL has promised a redone rigging system for years.
in fact when the poser 6 figures were released and they lacked the extra body parts that vicky3, mike3, etc have there was a statement by CL or efrontier or whomever that the reason these extra body parts (which are essentially just more workarounds) were not included is because when they redid the rigging system in poser 7 they would be unneccessary.

since then i havent heard a peep about reworking the rigging.
poser is a posing and animation application. there have been so many updates and so much new functionality added that people are losing focus as to the primary purpose of the program. its at the point now where the main thing holding our poser renders and animations back is the poor rigging.

this is how a shoulder should look:

(reposted from cgtalk, i believe the mesh belongs to steven stahlberg)

marque -- poser has its benefits even pitted against a program such as maya.
poser used to be very efficient in what it did - which was primarily posing and animating figures. many animators who worked in professional applications still used poser as an animation aid... though most were loathe to admit it.

the problem is that some people are obsessed with this idea of making poser into a jack of all trades program that does everything. it doesnt take rocket science to deduce that a program that tries to do everything will ultimately be good at nothing. there are currently very affordable modeling and morphing applications. people need to stop trying to coerce eF into making poser into a modeler/morpher and let them concentrate on the important aspects.

Carodan - that's a fantastic character you've created there - great work!

Rigging in Poser:

Yep, that's the real biggy - Even Apollo had funky knee bends - I heard someone throwing around the concept of including a jaw-bone for the head...I guess that would mess with the face room somewhat.

Has anyone ever sketched out what the "ideal" poser skeleton would look like? I'd love to see the concept illustrated...I can only image using some form of double boning in problem areas.

Cheers

the ideal poser skeleton would have weight mapped joints and/or flexible bones, etc.... industry standard features which just do not exist in poser's current prehistoric acsii-based CR2 rigging system, and sadly probably wont exist in the next one -- especially with people asking for the wrong features.

so i predict that in poser 10 we will have global illumination, a complete subdivision surfaces and NURBS modeling suite, a particle generator and physics system, network rendering, 2 million polygon base models (because everyone knows that higher resolution is better, right?) with 200 body part groups and 400 JCMs, but still wont be able to lift a character's arms over their heads in a render without spending hours on postwork.

Hold on, guys.  I might postpone this petition.  I have not read everything posted yet, but I like **karen1573'**s idea about sending separate e-mails.  It probably would have more of an impact. 

Also, there is a petition site I think I am going to use where you also post your e-mail adress, too.  What we could do is perhaps create the petition with all our e-mail adresses on it in addition to names and afterwords all people on the petition e-mail e-frontier and have a link to the petition in the e-mail.  That way, we can get the best of both worlds.

How does everybody feel about this?

Quote - Here's my first play with James in the P6 face room from a while back. Not too hard to get him looking different and non-freakish - his expressions still work fine also.

Dude!  That morph is of James?  What a hot face you created!  Nice work...you should rrrrreeeeaaallllyyyy put that up for grabs!  :rolleyes:  Seriously, nice work, I've never seen James look so good.

To the OP, yes, the face room inhales much wind very loudly.  It does take a lot of playing around, but, you can do some pretty funky stuff in it.  I'm just now going back into the face room, determined to learn it, because when I took a class at the college I live near, the instructor took about 1 day to explain it, made some mutations and then we moved on. :cursing:  I'm all for a re-working of the face room to make it user friendlier.

StevieG

in one ear and...

I just finished reading all the posts and I see where some of you guys who are against this are coming from.  I really never thought of the fact that it is very expesnive to create realistic heads and poser is meant for figure bending.  I just remember when I bought Poser 5 a while back and how they advertised that you could create realistic CG face doubles to real humans.  That's one of the main reasons I got it.    

I've got ZBrush recently and I'll try and fool around with that.  Still not 100% sure what I'm doing with this petition, though.  As of now, unless some of you can convince me otherwise, I am not very sure it will happen.

@ blackhearted

i wouldn´t count on poser to get any better. it is not the people loosing focus,  i´d rather say poser went astray. what was meant to be a utility for illustrators turned to be a toy for hobbyists. i dare say that the majority of poser users does never touch the joint editor, let alone the setup room. they don´t want tools, the want toys - and content, of course. and if the customers don´t care, why should eF?

i am still on p5 because i couldn´t find a single improvement in p6 worth the money. but maybe they will spend some real work on p7 - 1500 euros, 2000...why not?

but i wouldn´t be surprised if poser 8 comes for free at daz together with the m4/v4-bundle.

i fear that poser has reached a dead end.....

sorry,

A.

Quote - Thanks to Karen aswell, for educating me as to what spamming is (on the other thread dvdcdr started) the last time i had encountered spamming was on the school playground, where if you had combed your hair back, someone would come up, slap you on there forehead, and shout "SPAM" (LOL) so now i know it's not the same thing then!!

Hahahaa!! Oh my god I remember that... I had a fringe so never really got spammed myself but one of my friends had a very wide forehead and no fringe (a very "spammable spam" as we said) and by lunchtime she would have been "spammed" by every kid in our class!

Kids, eh? LOL

Quote - i dare say that the majority of poser users does never touch the joint editor, let alone the setup room.

the problem is that many do, yet ultimately cant do much with it. sure, something like apollo or even what daz has done with the mil3 figures (and no doubt mil4) is great... but its still crap compared to a properly rigged figure using industry standard tools. all of the bending capabilities that we have in our models now are nothing but hacks that poser community veterans have discovered as workarounds to the shortcomings of the poser rigging.

the work that daz, anton, jimb, etc have done on their figures to help them bend better is nothing short of heroic, but the fact remains is that they are working with a prehistoric rigging system. just how many more toys and box bullet points are people going to scream for until they realise that right now the biggest shortcoming of poser is its joint system - which is supposed to be the core of the entire damned program.

do people not realise that movement and pose are the most important factors in realism or believability? you can take a completely unrealistic anime character, rig it properly and animate it with good motion capture, and even though it has completely unrealistic proportions and is rendered with a cartoony cel shader, your mind will accept it as a 'real' character after watching for a few minutes because of its fluid lifelike movements, poise, and behavior.
yet take the most high-res, photorealistic character rendered with subsurface scattering, AO, GI, etc etc and rig it with crappy joints, apply the same motion capture, and the first time that character moves the spell will be broken and it will be discarded by the brain as awkward artificial rubbish. the fact that the above is even painfully evident in gallery 3D still renders is absolutely unbelievable.

even daz is missing the point. they are releasing V4, which will no doubt be an even further subdivided V3 with even more body parts, morphs, JCMs and CR2 hacks to get her to look better.. while in fact what they should be doing is ditching the archaic ascii-based CR2 format in daz studio and reworking it to support a more industry standard weight-mapping joint system. so now we have 2 companies creating products and unfortunately listening far too much to the general poser userbase who is more captivated by bullet points on a software box and fancy new catch-words like subsurface scattering to realise that the core of the program they are using has been obsolete for 2 versions and counting.

The face room is pretty much useless to me because the window is so dang small you can't even really use the morphs that are provided. I am sorry but a locked 200 by 200 window is useless for fine tuning stuff. Plus the texture stuff is a nightmare but since they have made the face room the place to go for using the head morphs it basically means that it is useless to me. Even if I used the P6 people. That is one thing that holds me back. The biggest thing is the joints and body shapes though.

And I dd agree with Balckhearted on this but this isn't that discussion ...

Quote - And I dd agree with Balckhearted on this but this isn't that discussion ...

it is highly relevant, however.
petitioning eF to improve the faceroom, even if it is successful, is only going to divert precious development time away from issues that are of a much higher priority, such as the actual rigging system that is the core of all poser functionality.

Ok, when there's a petition that focuses on what Blackhearted has said, then I'll sign it.

I realized some people feel this is not the place for that discussion, but it needs to be said; the more often and the louder the better.

Poser needs a re-write.  From the ground up.  Its version 7, i'd say its past due.

I agree that what Poser really needs is an updated rigging system for better skin over muscle over bone simulation - other higher-end apps have had this for quite a while now. But flexible character design is also a key feature for me.

What I always liked about the face room is the development of characters without the overhead of morphs in the figure itself. Body shaping would benefit from this approach. I'm not much into the idea of having to buy dozens of seperate figures for the varying body shapes/ethnic/age options, so the 'ultimate morphable base figure' with parametric morphs built into the app itself sounds so much more appealing. This sort of approach would imply that the rigging system would either adapt to the changes made in the 'ultimate body/head room', or be flexible enough to cope with new shapes. Apollo has very flexible scaling - moreso than any other figure I've ever used.

The recent development of new figures from EF might suggest that this idea isn't a direction they plan to follow with the next incarnation of Poser at least.

Whoa, there are two pages to this forum now.  I did'nt see until I replied..

Carodan - I forget why, but I remember somebody telling me the Faceroom morphs work on the textures, not geometries.

Angelouscuitry - There are FaceRoom dials for both texture options and head geometry morphs (in P6).

Wow, Carodan - another nice piece of Facerooming! (and texturing)

Must go look at your gallery...

Cheers

bigjobbie - sadly, I don't use the default P6 figures for much as the body shaping options are so limited. Mostly in the Rendo galleries I've posted renders using Apollo.