hey hey hey now... just because Im a TES fan doesnt mean I settle for women that look like Orcs. On the contrary she was quite a looker. Im sure you wont believe me but its true lol

But on topic I dont see what would be difficult about implementing that feature into the game. Each platform could do it. The feature could work well for Redguards, Imperials etc

Total agreement, their software was cool when Oblivion came out because generating faces was new. But now it just produces ugly and I hope Bethesda has made their own solution.

FaceGen seems to be fine, potentially. In the OP's video, when the narrator scans his face, it comes out perfect. But all the random generated faces he shows before that have the same problem Oblivion had, namely the soft features that made everybody look like they had either gigantism or fetal alcohol syndrome. The jaws were huge, the cheeks were chubby, the eyes were not placed right, and the skin tones were always off.

The technology and capability is there...they just need to identify what general parameters look more "normal" and make it easier to land within them, rather than giving you free reign to easily create a monster.

They also need to change how moving one slider can affect another. I understand certain facial characteristics are dependent on one another, but they need to isolate them as much as possible. If you end up with something that looks off balance, you can then go that individual slider and change the problem there.

Agreed. It was terrible. It was impossible to make a good looking character and the NPCs was so ugly that i would actually be surprised when one of them didn't look like crap. As someone else mentioned, part of the problem was the lightning. It was impossible to know how your character would really look until you where done. And then they managed to make this problem even worse in Fallout 3. :banghead:

Still, if the choise stands between this and the "pick 1 of 10 faces and a piece of hair" system from Morrowind, i would take the Oblivion/Fallout 3 system anyday.

But then again, maybe the Morrowind system really is the right one, it was just too simplified. Maybe they should just drop the sliders and let the player chose between 20 to 60 different face, eye, nose, mouth, forehead shapes and so one. Or a combination of the two.

Is the tech the problem, or is the problem of how it was used? E.g. having too many nondescript similar faces because they didn't have the time to tweak them further. I think the faces got alot better in Fallout 3.

getting warm....

The first question you need an answer to is what exactly is facegen and what exactly does it do. The quick answer is: it is a morphing technology. this allows subtle shape and dimention changes to a head mesh... an inexpensive way for allowing for an infinite variety of heads shapes. and also a texture blending system, that allows for a large variety of skin tones.

It's basically a system that makes shape changes to a head mesh. and is used as a container format for the facial morph animations.

Then ask what is it actually capable of.

that would be incredibly lame

how is a texture lame?

I don't really see a problem with the tech and thought FO3 improved over OB in implemention. Better head meshes in FO3 but fewer sliders. Found it harder to make radically screwy faces but also harder to dial in what I wanted. Still wish they'd move the damn neck seam up from the pit. Need to make thin/thick necks to fit different bodies. Its unmorphed anyway.

Yes i can imagine ugly people would be against it.

I really dislike the character generators Oblivion, FO3 and F:NV has.

I always always thought it was terrible compared to other games, games that are otherwise much worse than Bethesda's games.

I loved DA:O's Neck Thickness slider. It was like digital candy to me.


Now now, be nice.

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It could stand to get better, if they could develop a system where face parts didn't move because you changed another part it would be much much better. But, in all honesty, you can make some good looking faces with the engine. FaceGen isn't the issue... it's just how it was used before.

Things modders have done while still using FaceGen:

http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/30707-4-1269704995.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/20166-2-1223158011.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/8744-1-1195970874.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/33044-1-1280244262.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/4431-4-1192869114.jpg

I made these faces:
http://i888.photobucket.com/albums/ac87/MartutTES/ScreenShot230.jpg
http://i888.photobucket.com/albums/ac87/MartutTES/ScreenShot204.jpg
http://i888.photobucket.com/albums/ac87/MartutTES/ArthurReturningHome.jpg

Uhm, Martut this is a face some average guy created from http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y270/andrewmyspace/Blog/MassEffectCharacter01.jpg and yes, on average this is how things turned out unless you deliberately tried to make it look weird. I think the image speaks for itself though

I love facegen. If they downgrade it to something like Dragon Age I will be furious. They better make something that works better and has more options if they are dropping face gen.

Half of the nice-ness is the expression that he's making though. The expressions were awful in FO3 and Oblivion. Unless his eyebrows go over his eyes which is a cool feature.

You could make that with a unique texture (could be an age texture, even) for the face, precise normal mapping, and better lighting than what they had, aside from the eyebrows going over the eyes if that's not an expression.

I never said it wasn't better that what's out there, but we're looking at what they were capable of in the past, not today.

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Example: Here is the Default Bethesda Fallout 3 Male head mesh rendered in better lighting: http://i888.photobucket.com/albums/ac87/MartutTES/Fallout3Head.jpg

All I want is a Black Dunmer, not some Blue tinted poof.

It would be a real shame if the characters looked worse than this, and this is a SPACE SIM MMO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3P7cu4ekuY

That's a link I had in my thread on character creation.

Either way, that's for your avatar, so having it be High-Res and very complex makes complete sense. If I understand correctly you aren't running around like that, it's just for a picture. It would probably take a lot out of your computer to have 50 of those running at you at once.

Nope, you get to run around like that. Facegen is very, very old compared to modern stuff dude.

FaceGen was well suited for Oblivion's needs, but technology is getting better. The Eve Online video is proof.

I don't live in a cave. APB's like... the best one out there. (And I'm 17, so... "modern" is relative. I've only been into serious computer games for 2 or 3 years now. Before that it was Warcraft 3 and those run-of-the-mill MMOs)

I'm not under some illusion that FaceGen is the cure-all for all face generation and that all systems should switch to FaceGen because it's the best. It isn't the best, it's far from it, it's blown out of the water by so many other things. However, I'm saying that if worst comes to worst it doesn't have to be that bad if they do things correctly.

I liked it.
Just took patience to get a great looking character.
I have designed a few babes in my game.

the problem with the freedom, is that we had the freedom to make them look ugly also.
so I can understand why having some premade beauties is desirable.

looks very similar to facegen... I see a what is probably more morphs targets for the shape morphs. The controls look nice and fluid. In reference to that video, what specifically is giving you hard ons for the eve character gen?

Sorry. Couldn't resist. :sadvaultboy: