I don't have poser 5 right now, but hope to know how well those new feathers work. Can anyone post some pictures of a real person, and a render to show how real the face room can do?

I did a shot of me the other night. It was ugly. Guess I hadn't looked into a digicam lately. it worked just fine though.

Yes and No. I've spent many hours in the FACE ROOM now and know most of it's quirks, lacking help & information, positives and negatives.

It gets reasonably close ... but it in no way can make perfect replicas. I've done four real-world people, and about 3 iterations (or more) of each trying to get each one perfect.

The ultimate test was showing one of my wife to my son and asking him if he knew who it was ... He said "Hey, that's Mommy!" However, I did one of here sister and he said "Is that Joey's father?"

The controls for lining up the facial features are extremely UN-intuitive and frustrating. Also, there is not adequate documentation and/or recommendations of where face lines and control points should go optimally. Hopefully Nosfiratu will have a turorial or other info posted on their site soon.

Again, you can get close and probably make the person recognizeable, but it won't be anything like a carbon copy. It is a lot of FUN, but could use improvement.

-Tim

Oh yeah ... this is really annoying: The LIMITED TEXTURE MAPPING {<-see link} ability is also very disappointing and baffling. Nosfiratu is supposed to be posting some type of info on this as well. The lack of an UNDO feature tops the list too ... very frustrating. Also, there is no way to save just the head. :(

Here's just an idle thought. The face room was a not-insubstantial cost to CL. It takes man-months of time to add each figure to work in it. So, I find myself wondering, if it had not been included, perhaps CL would have had enough time to finish more of the rest of the program before shipping (they said themselves, they had to ship or die, finished or not), and maybe even could have brought home paychecks in those last few months. So, given that, think it was worth it?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=872263&Start=1

I find myself wondering if CL did *any* coding on this thing, or was all the technology licensed? (see link) If that's the case, what the hell took three years? For me the face room didn't work at all. It let me in, let me mess around for about an hour, then threw me out and locked up Poser. Happened every time I tried it. I obviously need more experience.

I bought Avatar Lab mainly for the face texture mapping portion, but it only saved 256x256 maps, not much to get excited about. I recognized the same type of face mapping in Poser 5 but just knew it had to be higher resolution, and it is, but 512x512 for new textures created from photos just is not good enough for closeup views of models. I'm not talking all you see is pores close either. It is good enough for average scenes that don't focus in too close on the face of a character. The tools, while not as flexible as they could be, are pretty simple to use. You may not get a replica of a person's face, but you can do a fair enough job with good photos and plenty of patience. Additional morphing may bring that head into shape better.

Now for the ability to modify existing textures to create new looking characters, the face room is easy, fast and fun to use. (when you don't have any other issues like parameter dials that won't disappear when you change from the pose room) A matter of seconds playing with the putty tool on a character's head that has a goodly amount of quality morphs to work with and quickly tweaking the textures, you have a radically new face. For the most part, the face room works fine for me, but it has its glitches now and then.

I give it a thumbs up in general, provided bugs are fixed and the resolution of maps created from photos are preferably user definable, at at least raised to match at least the low end of high resolution.

Ditto!

It is cool.Just fix the resolution thing.AND make P4 more user friendly IN Poser5.;o)

I don't think it works very well, Artist3D. Putting the green control dots into place does not get the red contour lines (actual predictors of mesh shape) into the right place, and dragging the green dots around until the red lines come closer is a fishing expedition with no guarantee the red lines will ever match the face contour. Then when you try to correct the bad stuff with the Face Shaping tool you find out that yes, you can move an individual vertex but no, the "pins" will not hold the surrounding vertices in place so that you can't even correct a bump in the nose without shoving the nose into the face.

It looks like a good start, a good interface for the job, but so far, no, it doesn't work well.

I read posters who fell they're getting better results than I am, though none of them argue you can get real likenesses. It's true that I don't work with "plain vanilla" faces. But if I did, what would I need the Face Room for?

Bill Adams