Well, I've decided to take a break from my V4 child project and work on something else for a while.  I've now turned my attention towards seeing if I can create something I found sadly lacking in V4's morph pack: ethnic morphs.

My first stop was the Far East.  Here's a standard V4 with custom textures and my Oriental morph applied.

Here's the recipe of sorts that I came up with:

• clockwise slanted eyes that squint slightly.
• thin eyelids with the fold virtually invisible on the inner half of each eye
• small, simple lacrimals
• slightly widened, round, somewhat flattened nose that points slightly upwards
• high, slightly prominent cheekbones
• small, narrow lips with the top lip being thiner than the bottom
• high jaw angle
• slightly narrowed chin
• slightly rounded, flattened, shortened face

I currently have a first draft of an African morph as well.  Here's the recipe:

• eyes slanted sightly clockwise with the eyelid fold moved down a little
• slightly protruding cheekbones
• wide, slighty flattened nose with large nostrils
• lower edge of septum appears lower than the lower edge of nostrils
• thick lips
• somewhat large jaw

For some reason, I had a keen sense of what made an Asian face Asian, but the other ethnicities aren't quite as easy to parse out into individual feature settings.  Looking at photos only helps somewhat, since none of what I can find are designed to be ethnic reference shots.  I'd like some advice on what the archetypical characteristics are for each of the following broad ethnic categories:

-   Oriental (if you don't think I've got it right already)
-   African
-   European
-   Aboriginal
-   Arab
-   Indian (Southwest Asian)
-   Native American
-   Latina

I have some vague ideas at least, but I think external feedback will improve the accuracy of my morphs.  I'm not sure, but Arabs and Indians may be similar enough that I can combine them into a single morph.  I think Native Americans are only slightly different from Asians, maybe with even higher cheekbones, a less upturned nose, and a slightly lower outer eye corner.  I also think Aborigines are only slightly different from Africans, perhaps only with even more pronounced cheekbones and brows.  For the Latina, I'm debating whether I should create a morph from scratch or simply use an even blend of Native American and European,  This is because I think the Latino ethnicity is little more than the result of various interbreedings between Spaniards and Mayans/Aztecs/Incas compounded over many generations.
Of course, there is great variety even within each of these broad categories, so virtually every feature I include in the morph is a generalization, but that's really all I want.  I'm going for the archetype, the average.

Anyone who can give me ideas as to what features typify any one and any number of these ethnic groups or point me towards any helpful internet resources will have my gratitude!

Thanks!

the morphs are already there. try the preset character morphs.

Hi Iuvenis_ScriptorI think you also need to take into consideration skin tone and color. There are many figures that are ethnic that of course can be purchased from here. It seems to me the important feature of ethnicity is skin tone, not so much facial structure. I have seen women with small lips, pointed noses, and such that were Black, and vice-versa.

I've already created a set of 7 different skin texture sets ranging in tone from very dark to very light.  My focus is on facial structure only because it's the more difficult aspect to depict accurately.  I'll post an example of one of my darker skin tones as soon as I get the chance.

Ok. Here are examples of my 2 different skin tones. The morphs are the same for both. I only added curves to their mouths, and enlarged the nose. Victoria 4.1 Morphs++ were used. Looking forward to seeing your work.

The V4 on the left has my European morph and skin tone #2 applied.  The V4 on the right has my African morph and skin tone #6 applied.

Thoughts?

The V4 on the right looks the same as v4 on the left with less light. Like you took the same texture map and darken it with less diffuse. In mine above, 2 different skin maps were used with the lighting the same. The nose does look bigger and the lips stick out more on your african morph. Not bad. I do see your initial point though. I was just trying to point out that you can make 2 different races without changing the morphs at all.

The lighting is the same and the textures are different, just like in yours.  There's no color diffusion involved.  What you may be seeing is the underlying technique I used to create the textures.  This is what I did to another texture set of mine to create the 7 tones in Photoshop.  I used either the Hue/Saturation or Brightness/Contrast command for steps 1 and 2.

1)   Lightened up the texture slightly and saved the result.  This became Tone 1.
2)   Darkened the texture to the darkest reasonable tone, slightly increased the saturation for a more natual look, and saved the result.  This became Tone 7.
3)   Copied Tone 7 into a new layer on top of Tone 1.
4)   Resaved the image under a different file name with the dark-tone layer at each of the following Fill settings: 17%, 34%, 50%, 66%, and 83%.  These became Tones 2 - 6.

Regarding your point about using textures alone to convey ethnicity, in many cases, you're probably right.  I had a hard time finding specific featuresbesides skin tone that distinguished Arabs from Europeans.  Arabs and Indians also seem to look very much alike.  I just did my best from the photos I was able to find and study.  The idea is that a hypothetical user can use the textures by themselves, but the morphs are there in case he/she wants them.

P.S.: If you want to see a more extended example, check out my two most recent gallery submissions.

I would've put this in the above message, but I think 'Rosity's having technical problems.  The server thinks the allowable editing time has lapsed, but the above message has only been up for about 10 minutes.  It also told me I'd already reached the daily gallery upload limit yesterday when I went to upload what was only my second image that day (the limit is 2 per day, isn't it?). 

Not wanting to be too blunt, but if these weren't shown next to each other I would never have known they weren't default V4.  The morphs are far too subtle! The eyes in particularly look to be identical.

Photo references are a God send when it comes to creating realistic morphs. I find it helpful to exaggerate key ethnic features at frame 30 and tone them down to frame 15-20. It's also important to note that it's not only the big three (nose, eyes, mouth) that differ between races. Skull shape and forehead slope go a long way to strengthening a morphs accuracy.

equan, those texture variants are fantastic, and your render quality is outstanding. I'd love to get my hands on those! :)

Unfortunately, I know nothing about frames.  All I'm doing is finding just the right dial settings and then saving the resulting head as a morph target OBJ.

i want to add my voice to what ClawShrimp said.  there's a certain very African (and often African-American) look that i've never been able to acheive in a figure because there are no morphs for the back of the head.  actual skull shape can do a lot.  and yes, use references.  because mostly what we think we see isn't actually what's there.  and it's even worse if what we're trying to depict is less familiar.

Frame 1 - 30, left to right.

If you dial a morph at frame 1, and a completley different morph at frame 30, moving the slider to frame 15 will give you a perfect mixture of the two.

For the skull shape, particularly the back of the head (as cobaltdreams mentioned) custom magnets are almost always necessary. Again, these aren't nearly as scary as they sound, especially when dealing with such a large area. It's the teeny tiny little ones that can be tricky :).

Currently the differences between your European and African morphs seem to be a broader nose and fuller lips. There may be more but they're subtle to the point of practical invisibility.

The included image is clearly not V4 (it's Apollo) but serves to illustrate my point. Even when puposely similar, morphs need to be unique enough to be easily distibguishable, and without the animation slider, creating these morphs would have been a nightmare!

Hey Claw, Thanx 4 the comps. I will zip up the texturem maps, and post them here if i can. if not i'll email them to you. check out my gallery, I used my recreation maps on all the figures.

As far as shaping the head, you can use the taper tool at the top to reshape the head. I often use it to make certain heads slimmer. V4.1 morphs are fantastic for getting the shape and features you want

That's a really good point equan.

Tapering is often ignored as a means of shaping.

I would zip up those texture maps but I recreated them using a figure i purchased called Mariah. She can be found here. All I did was darkened them by resetting the diffuse value to .6
I don't want any flak for uploading someone else's stuff. Sorry.

Fair enough :).

Thank you for the effort regardless.