flibbits opened this issue on Sep 12, 2007 · 14 posts
momodot posted Wed, 12 September 2007 at 9:39 AM
This product in not a "Make Art Button".
The textures it produces are great but must be edited in a paint progarm to remove image shadow and mirroring artifacts, easy to do if you just paste the texture on an existing texture and bring them into harmony.
The morph also is not a simple one-click either. Most people generate at least two morphs from either the same source image or different ones and blend them. A single morph used alone should not be dialed over about .6 in anycase. The morph does not effect head scaling so that must be dealt with. I typically use the morph it first to bring some organic life to the Daz mesh and second as a starting point for additional morph dialing...
I would say that the FaceShop morph gets me about 80% there and serves as a tremendous guide to understanding what is characteristic about the face and how to approach the fine tuning with standard morphs. I actually don't use source photos of celebrities or anyone I know, just generic artist models from Levius and elsewhere to get figures that look unlike the Daz base and have some more livelyness. I have gotten nice celebrity likness is testing though. I have also for instance created a morph for the Poser 4 Nude Man head to make it resemble closely the M3 default head.
There is a learning curve and skill/tallent does play a roll in the results you get. Performance is greatly enhanced by the extent to which you are willing to prep the source photos and even spawn head geometry already morphed to the facial expression shown in the photo for the application to work on. It is a character makers tool not a one-click cloner. I am very very happy with the results I have gotten and I think it is a great addition to my Poser work. I look forward hopefully to the continued development of this product.
I think people either love it or hate it. The people who do not like it are put off by the idea of doing the prep and post work (N.B. the vendor promos show results achieved without this extra work) and by the bare bones user interface design. The people who do like it see it as a labor saver, a more efficient and effective approach to the objective that failed Poser Face Room module promised. It is most voluable to me for the subtle livelyness or realism I think it endows on the more sterile Daz mesh.
For what it is worth, that is my review.