To practice sculpting, I'd like to try and sculpt celebrity faces. So I thought I could use some screengrabs from movies as reference. But these are rarely ideal front or side images, but I wondered if one could still use them to synthesize some key coordinates of a face, like eye nose and ear position/distance/etc. to have an anchor during sculpting. A program that allows to mark the eyes and nose tip on various photos and that computes vertices at the proper 3d coordinates.

There is quite some theory out there (epipolar geometry, fundamental matrix, lots of funny things), for example on wikipedia, to reconstruct 3d coordinates based on photos but it seemed that one needs to know some key parameters of the camera (focal distance, or relative position of the camera used for different photos). I didnt find any approach that accepts just a set of projected 2d coordinates. I thought it should be possible in theory with enough sample points available, no?

Anyone knows a good and simple program/script that can help with deriving key 3d points from 2d photo sets?

Thanks :)

You may find this news paper item of interest.

"Disney software turns any photo into a 3D model"

Look here - FaceShop

and here.

Lots of useful info., apart from the fact that it doesn't really work, at least I've never been able to produce anything useable from it in years of trying.

I had tried faceshop years ago and it was not working well for me at all. It made grotesque monsters no matter what I tried :)  monstershop... back then i didn't understand why this was allowed to be in the daz shop.

anyways, a full head is too much ask for. i just want to reconstruct a few reference points for sculpting. single vertices are enough. coordinates of the eyes, ears, nose and a few more, the stable parts of the head.

i tried to read some papers, but its difficult, some of them are incomplete and stole their texts from other sources without citing them properly, so one cannot follow up. its complicated math, and i am not familiar with the matter. i understand there is a  projection matrix transforming 3d coordinates into 2d coordinates, and each photo has its own projection matrix because of camera position and rotation, but it it seems one cannot just formulate an equation system to solve, otherwise the papers had said so, i think. maybe its because of the 4d coordinate system, that one cannot apply the easy linear algebra methods.

there are big number cruncher programs for laser data, and also photo to mesh solutions, but it looks all incredible complicated and unprecise, they process the photos and through guessing algorithms at them, that will not work. just mark the key feature points on the images and reconstruct, this should work, i just do not know how :)

a projection matrix, is this invertable? it has a 4th dimension and I think this dimension has a special non linear function isn't it?

 

For reference photos, mugshots work nicely.  All from the same police agency have the same angle and distance and lighting.  Front and side.

For software, we can assume the gov't has the best, and we can assume they'll never let us have it!

not sure this will do what your wanting but worth a look ?

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html

dont be put off by the video word ;-) it works from an image sequence

Attached Link: http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/product.php?productId=PFTrack

If you can find a ref. video of the model turning his/her head even slightly(may work with photo's also) PfTrack can accurately compute the position of user defined points in 3d space, hell you can even build animated textured geometry right on the video and export it in several formats to use in other programs. This software is incredible, not cheap by any means though, but theres a free trial . :)

 

http://vimeo.com/57939161

You may want to try Looxis Faceworx. They've put it back online again after taking it off their website back in 2011. It's very easy to use, all you need are two photos of the persons face and you can export the head model in .obj format. Here's the link:

 

http://www.looxis.de/looxis-faceworx-tool

that faceworx looks fun but has anyone had it working on 64 bit comps?? (website says no)

just sold my last 32 bit a month or so ago would hate to buy one just for this ;-)

Quote - that faceworx looks fun but has anyone had it working on 64 bit comps?? (website says no)

just sold my last 32 bit a month or so ago would hate to buy one just for this ;-)

 

Heddheld, you could always try running a virtual OS like Windows 7 32 bit or Windows XP using software like Oracles free Virtualbox or VMWare. Mind you, you do need a fairly powerful system. I'd say you need at least 4 to 6 gigs of RAM and a good processor like an Intel I series or an AMD quad core. For example,  I'm running Virtualbox using an AMD Phenom II X6 1035T processor with 8 gigs of RAM. I'm running virtual versions of Linux Mint and Windows XP with Virtualbox and they run quite smoothly. Just an idea if you don't want to buy a whole new system. :o)

i did a quickie test on my W7Pro 64 machine & it seems to run ok. YMMV 

zBrush is Sculpting

C4D is Modeling

Your all talking about scanning has nothing to do with Modeling or Sculpting.

 

thanks all !!  that faceworks WORKS lol

 

@RorrKonn the OP asked for "A program that allows to mark the eyes and nose tip on various photos and that computes vertices at the proper 3d coordinates"

while voodoo can do that getting the "points" to a 3d shape can be tricky (ish)

probably be easier to subD a cube pull it roughly into shape then subD again and start sculpting ? afriad for me at least sculpting is beyond my skills!!! keep trying and slowly/maybe getting better can make some nice rocks now rofl

3D scans are Tri'ed and no topology flow so ya would need to re topology or ZRemesher them.

---

Michel said David was all ready in the stone.
All Michel had to do was release David from the stone.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zbrush+rock+tutorial

The skill is in us all ,All we half to do is release the skill.

amen to that lol !! had a demo of zbrush once but really couldnt get into it :-(

 

Quote - i did a quickie test on my W7Pro 64 machine & it seems to run ok. YMMV 

Yes, I was kind of curious myself and had the original version of Faceworx still installed on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit so I tried it yesterday and it does work. I don't know why Looxis says it won't.

Attached Link: Facial Studio

 "A program that allows to mark the eyes and nose tip on various photos and that computes vertices at the proper 3d coordinates."

 Facial Studio does what you ask.

I use it to get a base head mesh shaped from photos I have, then to Zbush for high detailed sculpting.

Does a decent job.

**Never tried Looxis Faceworx but for the price (Free) it's worth looking at.
**

** **

Chuck