Quote - ... more than the morphs the texture is paramount
Panos

Back in the Dark Ages of Poser, I remember seeing photos of celebrities mapped onto properly proportioned eggs. The result was recognizable. It seems to me that one reason celebrity morphs "work" is that for most of us, the celebrity's face is a carefully marketed commodity. In other words, it lacks the free form that real faces have. Hence the "unrecognizable" quality in papparazzi photos. We'd know Sandra Bullock's face if it was projected on a bust of Julius Caesar.

My first experience with the Face Room also confirmed your observation. I started from perfectly suitable photos of my less-than-stellar mug, and after hours of spinning, pulling, and tweaking, the resulting morph bore no more resemblance to my "mesh" than it did to Don's. Specifically, there was no way to match my mouth/chin/neck ratios (as I think P7 calls it), no way to achieve the "craggy" cheeks (high cheekbones, thin cheeks), and nothing that comes close to my Eli Wallach nose. But sure enough, the smeared, distorted texture looked just like me... since it was.

I would love to see a tool that harvested texture from photographs, and I think that, not a mini-Canoma that builds 3D models, is the key to celebrity "morphs." My favorite celebrity, MM, is wonderfully represented by Gwendolyn's "Star" (I hope I got that right). She got the Milton Greene marazipan skin perfect, and it's one of my favorite V3 items. But the bones are not quite right, and it still comes across as an impersonator.

M3 works as a moviestar mesh because his base look is that bland, characterless "handsomeness" of the Calvin Klein boy toy all grown up and ready to sell insurance -- Ken to V3's vacuously affluent, potentially bovine Barbie. As soon as you start trying to match faces with character and personality (Joel Macrae, Gary Cooper, Claude Rains, Yul Brynner, Clark Gable, David Niven, Sean Connery), things get iffy.

M