100 Faces

February 6, 2009

Over the last week, I've been taking a long hard look at all the projects I'm working on. Turns out that it's just over 50 different things I'm working on, and that's too much even for a student with no pressure to finish anything :P So I've stoved away the majority of them for later, and I'm now focusing on a total of 5 projects, which is much more reasonable...

I'm sure I will be telling you more about the individual projects later on, but for now I thought I'd show what I've been up to for the last couple of days:

(click to enlarge)

One of the games I'm working on requires lots of portrait pictures of people of all types and ages. As the recent versions of Poser have scripting abilities, I've composed a script which will generate and render lots of different characters automatically. The image above shows the first proper batch of 100, and while not perfect, they're pretty good enough for the effort involved in making them: One single click of a button, and out pops a hundred faces :D Next up is to do the same for female characters.

This is fun stuff to mess about with :-)

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Comments

Richard Marks

2009-02-05 16:45:31

Thats really awesome man! I sure would like to have a look at the script you made.

Verious

2009-02-09 07:46:58

That is very cool, but the ratio of men with gray/white hair seems abnormally high and the number with brown hair seems low.

Mattias

2009-02-10 00:34:07

Well, it differs quite a lot between runs, I might get a lot of white hair like in this example, or none at all for other sets of a hundred. I think that a hundred images is not a large enough set that we get an even distribution when just using straight random numbers..

Anyway, the way I'm using this is to generate a bunch of portraits, then deleting some to be left with a good collection to use for the game, which is easier than further tweaking of the script. For the sample picture here, I haven't delete any though.

As for the script itself, it's really very simple. All I do is add a bunh of lines like this:

scene.Figure("Character").Actor("Head").Parameter("NostrilWide").SetValue(random.random()*0.75)
scene.Figure("Character").Actor("Head").Parameter("EarShapeA").SetValue(random.random()*0.85)

And so on, with some additional code to loop it and render/save the result.

The thing that takes time is tweaking everything to get the look you want... But that's also the fun bit :D

Verious

2009-02-15 13:09:00

Your approach makes sense. I haven't played with Poser before, but the scripting aspect seems quite powerful.

erik

2009-11-01 08:51:53

hi this is exactely what ive been looking for (face generator). Any chance i could get hold of it for a non-profit game im making? (credits will of course be given) Erik

Mattias

2009-11-01 10:34:52

Well, I'd be happy to share it if I could, but it wouldn't be any good to you unless you have Poser and all the specific add-on content which I have used for this (and the license for those doesn't allow me to share them).

Your best bet, if you have Poser v6 or higher, is to make your own script - see my last comment - which isn't that hard, and can be tweaked to use the add-ons you have. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you have on that.

Or, you can just use the portraits I posted here, if that's any help :P

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