Phil, I forgot to say when I posted yesterday that the image you posted was an example of character creation, excellent. Gives me hope I can get what I want out of FS.

I don't begrudge anyone the celebrity game; have at it! If nothing else, sales of FaceShop for this purpose will keep the app healthy, alive and progressing. But even on the level of chasing the celebs, you've got to do better, in my opinion.  For one thing, I would suggest do not settle for the head shape generated by FS. That is one of the more disturbing aspects of the celeb renders being posted. I understand how/why FS is throwing off odd head shapes, but I'd say it would help your look-like-ness if you used a modeller or the Poser7 MorphBrushTool to make the head more pleasing.

One idea for the texture I heard someone say was to take the generated texture, the original texture of the head and the photo all into Photoshop (or your 2D of choice) and blend them together. This I thought was quite clever, and for one thing it might help you retain the original color right at the neckline with an eye towards seaming the head texture to the body texture.

Another level up would be to open the new head mesh with its new texture map in zbrush and tune it up with direct manipulation. In zbrush you can push and pull the mesh at the same time "painting" the texture. I don't have zbrush but that does sound good. The MorphBrushTool in Poser7 is a baby brother of zbrush.

::::: Opera :::::

If your FSP texture has been generated from a face-on picture, the sides will look poor (as the app has little or no data to work on) so if you blend the main face parts into a standard texture and match the basic skin colour then this improves the look and usability of the texture. And as you say, you can use the original photo to refine parts like lips and eyebrows.

I've yet to have more than a cursory play with the P7 morphing tool, but that looks to have a lot of potential with some work and patience, and as you say could be used to refine an FSP head as a starting point.  zbrush takes you into a whole new league, but at a significant price cost!

I have this time attached a head that I did to see if I could push FSP to extremes - it coped pretty well!

WOW! way cool!

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

Laslo

You bet.......this is wonderful!

Aside from one thing I'll mention in a moment, my opinion is that this is convincing as a face of a person, a human being. Makes me really excited to work with FS this coming weekend.

Can you say if you used a side shot, as is now supported in 3.5?

If you don't mind, I'll add a few ideas that might make this portrait become even more dramatic....take it or leave it.

We don't have an explanation of the reddish-orange glow lights coming at the face from his left, such as a fire or strong reflection. As a result, the lighting on the face clashes with the excellent background. Perhaps you used the default poser lights, which are orange-tinted?

Second, there is so much detail in the crags and crannies of this face -- you see that in the texture itself. However, the light is not interacting with them. If I were playing with this, I'd make a bump map or displacement map from the texture map and plug it into the proper slots in the Poser material room. Then, the "painted" wrinkles would correspond with the deformed polygons as driven by the bump map, and the lights would interact with those crevices. That could be striking.

At that point one might engage some AO on the face and that would add to the effect due to convincing tiny shadows overall.

If one were to take this even further, you'd make an HDRI probe from that background picture and light the scene with it. The lighting would then exactly emulate the lighting on the mountains and lake.

None of this is to take away from the obvious power of FaceShop and your efforts. Terrific.

::::: Opera :::::

Hi Opera,

Yes, I did use the new "Refine" feature tomake the nose more bent and prominent.
And Yes, I agree that the HDRI lighting would have been a better choice along with bump mapping. But hey, I can at least work on improving it - no point in finsihing it right away:-)

My main point was to see how far I can utilize the detailed texture of the original photo using the new 2048x2048 resolution in FaceShop 3.5. It came across pretty good.

Thanks for the excellent suggestions for the next render!
Laslo

If you want to try something fairly simple, make a safety copy of your pz3, delete all the lights. Then add one light and position it overhead. Make it "diffuse IBL". Then, in the material room with this light selected, plug a node into the first slot at the top, 2d texture -- image -- and attach your background .jpg to it.

What you are doing is telling poser to light the scene with the light from the .jpg. 

This IBL (Image Based Lighting) is better than typical spots and infinite, but not nearly as good as true HDRI technology.

::: Opera :::

Will do.
BTW: the background is my own photo (taken last year at Yosemita Park) and also featured in Poser Figure Artist as a background.
Laslo

Blender's sculpting tools are excellent, check them out.

i wanna go there!

Opera----I like that Imaged based lighting suggestion. How does making one light and connecting it to your JPEG in the Material room differ from using the already made IBL's in the library? More accurate lighting because it's of and for that specific image?

yes. 

Actually you can get everything in place by clicking in one of the IBL lights, then just go into the material room and change the attached image to the one that is your backdrop.

You are likely to get better results (a closer match between the light striking your model's face and the background) than if you use regular lights or the supplied IBL image.

Your Mileagle May Vary, however...

::::: Opera :::::

This is really good to know OG. Thank you.

the shadow catching is very good, makes it convincing. Good job overall, especially as this is a problematic picture because of the radical extremes of illumination.

Hm...........................................I just had a question......................

When you export from FS, you get the texture and you get????? I hope you get a morph, not an entire new head. If new head, you'd lose the head morphs...

I have not started using the program yet.

::: Og ::

I cheated with the shadow catching on this - it is just added by hand in Photoshop...but glad that you think it looks OK!

What you get out of FS3.5 is a revised version of the head model that you started with. You can import virtually any head - V2, V3, V4, Aiko, SP3, M3 etc, use FS3.5 to generate a morphed head and then save that. You can then in Poser use this new head as a morph target, you are generally recommended to apply this at perhaps 70% rather than the full 100% to avoid ripping the mesh, but you also have all other regular morphs available as well, so you can further tweak and modify the head to your heart's content!  The combination of texture and morph gives a good basis for a likeness, but as we have said here before, the more work you are prepared to put into it, the better this is likely to be!

Good, that sequence sounds okay.

Ha Ha caught you painting shadows. I do it to so no worries.

:: og ::

I didn't know that painting shadows was a crime!  In my book, it's the final image that counts and any method you use to achieve it is fair game.

I had an aditional thought on morphs - because you apply the output model as a morph target, there is nothing to stop you using multiple morph targets. Say for example you have two pictures of the person you want to model. You can have morph targets as follows:
Picture 1 original
Picture 1 mirrored (using the mirror function in FSP after saving the original mesh)
Picture 2 original
Picture 2 mirrored.

...and then apply morph percentages for each of these to achieve your desired final figure. Just a thought.

Phil, This picture is absolutely tops (or as the Germans say: Spitze!!!). Can you publish closeup renderings to see the face better? I am very curious... Laslo

Painting shadows: it is not a crime for stills, in fact it is a blessing.

But for animators like myself...4-minute short or music video = 7200 frames! It is a felony!

yes good ideas for the head morphs. I have seen morph sets for models that already have that concept in place; you can dial in partials to get influences. V4, for instance, comes with about 8 different female head 'looks' and you can feather them together. I do that all the time.

::::: Opera :::::

well that is quite a lot better don't you think? Especially in the first one, the light matches quite well

I can tell there's going to be trouble with the "uncanny valley" with FaceShop...the face looks TOO real, as if it is not a 3D mesh but a photo.

Needs noise or bump or displacement.

I am not complaining, believe me. It's a powerful tool.

::::: Opera :::::

Phil,

I am glad I asked:-)

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing! We should start a FaceShop "Hall of Fame"!
Laslo

She's lovely, btw.

The IBL lights really do bring out the best in the texture and morph, IMHO.

As for me, I usually use FaceShop as a starting point and work my way up in Poser, with the character's morphs. And I really love what it does with the textures.

Great work, Ariah!  Is the girl based on someone famous?

The actress played in one TV series and is not 'THE' girl in many Hollywood movies. Oh, and she dates now one famous guy who used to date older women ;) and she once dated the man she is pictured with in the previous picture... She even starred in a movie with him.

So it's not who I thought it might be - but struggling to make a positive ID! I must get more up to date on gossip!

Can someone do a step by step on getting the frankenstein looking output from FaceShop to the way these renders look? People usually say: - carefully follow the steps in Faceshop Result is a textured head that doesn't match the body. - do (unspecified) post work - here's the great looking render/image

Hi Flibbits,

There are a few general tips to using FaceShop (which you may have seen before, so apologies if I am repeating):

• use the best photo you can - high res, neutral light, not an extreme expression. I've generally found full face (or nearly) to be best, but you can use 3/4 face shots;
• be as accurate as you can in placing the initial points. When you complete the points phase, you get a representative head which should match the orientation of the head in your picture - if there are major differences, go back and re-do it.
• save both an original and a mirrored version, it gives you twice as much material to work with.

Faceshop is clever but it can't make textures from no information, so as the face turns away from the camera, the texture will get less accurate until it is useless for areas that were turned away from the camera when the photo was taken.  This is where a little work in Photoshop (or similar) goes a long way.

The basic technique I use (and I'm sure I've seen a fuller tutorial on this somewhere - perhaps Laslo can point you to it) is as follows:

• Open the original texture, the mirrored texture and a "default" texture - eg. V4 standard maps if your figure is a V4;
• ensure that they are the same size, re-size if needed;
• decide which FSP texture is the best - I prefer to use the original if possible as it will include assymmetric elements which contribute to the character of a face. Select All and Copy to the default standard texture - by selecting all the features will automatically align;
• use a layer mask to hide the poorer areas of the texture, while leaving the areas that are good and contribute to the character.  You can always refine certain areas at this stage using the original photo - eg. copy eyebrows, scaling as required to match the texture.
• At this point you will have basically two layers - the standard texture and the best bits of the FSP texture, but they probably won't match that well. Use the colour adjustment tools (levels, curves, contrast, saturation etc as required) to match as well as you can the FSP texture to the base texture. Doing this will avoid any significant changes between the FSP texture and the rest of the body - the problem that you specifically flagged.
• Save this new texture (under a different name), then go into Poser, load the standard texture MAT and then change the face texture to the new one that you just made.
• Load the morph targets (both orginal and mirrored) and apply some of these but probably less than 100% each, mix them to get the best look that you can without ripping the mesh.
• You can then fine-tune this with the built-in morphs as required.

That's it in a nutshell. As I've said before, the more work you are prepared to put in, the better result you are likely to achieve but FSP is a really useful shortcut to achieve a reasonable likeness.  Good luck!  and I hope this is useful.

Quote - Can someone do a step by step on getting the frankenstein looking output from FaceShop to the way these renders look? People usually say: - carefully follow the steps in Faceshop Result is a textured head that doesn't match the body. - do (unspecified) post work - here's the great looking render/image

You're quite correct with the steps.

The postwork part is -- in my case -- the most important one. 

First: the postwork on the texture. I take the FaceShop texture into Photoshop do my best to match it with the body texture. This requires some fiddling with tones and hues, contrast and lightness. Plus, getting rid of all 'dirts' and 'quirks' in the original face texture.

Having done that, I take the result into poser. I apply the face texture, use white light (a sort of in-your-face light) and apply the FaceShopr morph, but I don't use it at its fullest (1), rather 0.2

The rest is  (are?) the figure morphs. 3rd party morphs. And I twist the dials until I get to a satisfying point. Then I take a break. Then I twist some more.

Sometimes it works.

WOW Ariah.  Great work! Now I want to try this. 

Some things I do...

I export and prep several base heads  to work with in FS. I use mainly Victoria 3 Reduced Resolution in the default pose, with the smile morph, and with open smile morph. I have set the materials on these exported heads to FaceShopSkin as explained in the FS tutorial.

I think I use fewer nodes on my curves than most people but I try to get them consistant from the source to the target. I have experimented with things such as drawing the curve down from the brow to deliniate the entire eye socket.

I float the FS texture over a base texture, fix bad shadow etc. and mask problem areas. I adjust the base texture hue, value, and saturation to match the FS texture. I use Photoshop curves to set the value.

I open the morph .obj in Poser and fix any bad mesh with the Morph Brush set to smooth and re-save the .obj.

In poser I open a Jpeg viewer app window with my original source image and then try to match the head shape in Poser with scaling. I use one or two imported FS morphs at about .6 on the dial and then I start using the Daz morphs for fine tuning. I usually end up spawning morphs as I work and blending FS morphs with these compound dial spinning morphs for the final effect.

I use a morph to hide the eyelash mesh and substitute a morphing mesh based eyelash prop.

Attached Link: Ella's Tutorial

Thanks for the sale, I was going to wait until my trial was up, but I grabbed it tonight.

Frank,

You are welcome (luckily we have a special going this week at $51.95:-)
Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Laslo

I would like to get very good with this app and be of assistance to you. I know there is some frustration and dissapointment in some quarters and by pooling what we know that can be helped.

The idea of applying the before mirror and after mirror morphs is a good one. The only problem is that I've installed the FaceShop 3.5 trial on three computers, and on all three the mirror step does nothing. After the face and texture are saved both as a .fac and exported as .obj, I press either mirror button. It thinks for a second (the progress bar appears and finishes) but nothing happens to the model.

A few times I experienced some hesitation with the mirror function, too, but it always worked on the second try. Pls. play with it "before" and "after" refine and let me know if this is still an issue.
Laslo

Quote - The idea of applying the before mirror and after mirror morphs is a good one. The only problem is that I've installed the FaceShop 3.5 trial on three computers, and on all three the mirror step does nothing. After the face and texture are saved both as a .fac and exported as .obj, I press either mirror button. It thinks for a second (the progress bar appears and finishes) but nothing happens to the model.

Yes this happens to me too when I try & use the mirror button after saving - it doesn't work & I am using the bought version. The only way to get it to work is to hit the back button & make it compute the head again, then mirror. Mind you the mirrored versions don't seem to import into Poser that well, I always seem to get more of a distortion as in splitting etc, with the mirrored version.

I have only played with it for the last day & haven't made anything I am happy with yet. It is a bit annoying that the premarked M3 & V4 heads can't be used for Poser & you have to plot the figure points as well as the photo points each time. This in my opinion is one of it's major down falls, because I think this is part of the reason I haven't been happy with the results, it limits accuracy. If I had known it was really a DAZ Studio programme rather than a Poser programme I probably wouldn't have bothered with it.

Actually,

You can save at EVERY STAGE as .fac (see save buttons).
Fac files can be opened and will contain the dostg (or curves) or whatever you have there.
As for the V4 and M3 being used in Poser, there are two ways:

1. You can open V4 and M3 in Poser, export heads as OBJ (no eyes) and save them a .fac files.
   This way you always have them ready.
2. There is literature on how to use built-in heads and select a certain scaling for them to work in Poser.
   Laslo

Quote - Actually,

You can save at EVERY STAGE as .fac (see save buttons).
Fac files can be opened and will contain the dostg (or curves) or whatever you have there.
As for the V4 and M3 being used in Poser, there are two ways:

1. You can open V4 and M3 in Poser, export heads as OBJ (no eyes) and save them a .fac files.
   This way you always have them ready.
2. There is literature on how to use built-in heads and select a certain scaling for them to work in Poser.
   Laslo

If you save it as a fac file how do you use it at the beginning with a new photo?

Where is the literature on using the built-in heads, what page of the manual, I must of missed it?

OK. 
To answer your 2nd question first:
Here's a tutorial step-by-step by a user:
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=58692&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

To Question #1:
I misspoke there. You can save .fac files but they WILL retain the photo. I think for the next version we do want to create the ability to save unlimited "templates" - it is an excellent idea.
Laslo

I have the demo version and I created a couple of heads, one on V4 and one on M3. Guess I don't understand how to use them in Poser because they won't work as morph targets. Problem is my time limit is up and I can't afford the full version yet...sob. I want it!!! Ooops, exxcuse me for getting emotional. The heads came out looking just like the photos and I only needed to touch up the textures a bit. If you go to my gallery you'll see an example there, Huntress:Close-up, is made in FaceShop pro Demo. Wish I could get the full version so I could make these heads usuable in Poser but I got too many medical and household expenses right now. But if I ever get the cash, Face Shop Pro is mine. :)

If you want to use M3 or V4 in Poser, you have to first export the M3 (or V4) head OUT OF POSER as OBJ morph targets (see manual chapter 5 or watch demo video at http://www.abalonellc.com/watchdemovideo.html and

Import FaceShop 3.5 Faces in Poser

Laslo

Well I am not having much luck, & am a bit disappointed in the programme - too many errors.

I tried to save a project as a fac file, but when I went back to it, it won't open. I get the error noise & then the programme crashes.

Also if you use the refine button, you cannot mirror the result if you save first, as the mirror button does not work after saving, and after refining you cannot go back one step. If you hit back after refining it jumps right back to the beginning of the project.

I heard of crash with 64-bit systems (FS is currently 32-bit).
I agree, easier to mirror first and then do refine.
Also, practice helps:-)
Laslo
Ps: I suggest you send me tech support directly to info@abalonellc.com or info@pantomat.com

Quote - I heard of crash with 64-bit systems (FS is currently 32-bit).
I agree, easier to mirror first and then do refine.
Also, practice helps:-)
Laslo
Ps: I suggest you send me tech support directly to info@abalonellc.com or info@pantomat.com

I realise the programme takes practise, that  is not what I have issue with, it is the problems with the crashes etc that are frustrating me. I will email the details when I get a chance.