Facegen now on sale...get it!

cdpro_2831bbd990

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

Personally, I've always seen FG and other face generating tools to be useful more for coming up with similar characters rather than exact copies of famous people.  Famous faces are fun to do, but not much else.  If I want a character that has similar features to such and such an actor, I'll use their photo as a model, then use a different texture or at least an altered one to come up with a new character.  I consider FG to be a way to do character modeling without having to learn Zbrush or another 3D modeling program.  It does the heavy lifting, while I do the details.  Seen this way, it doesn't really matter if I get perfect copies of a photo face, as long as what I end up with looks like a good character.  I've ofter got 2 or 3 character faces from a single photo because slightly different point placement in FG can often greatly alter the output.

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

Wonderland

 

outrider42 said:

Wonderland said:

grinch2901 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

 

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

What does he mean by "higher end", Quatro cards?  TitanX?

The 1000 series ( 1060, 1070, 1080) are cheap compared to prior generations and low power consumption, and really good performance. In my mind they are absolutely worth it.  GTX 1060 is $259 on sale at Amazon right now so maybe he doesnt consider that a "high end" card (since it's pretty close to his $200 value price point) but it's pretty darned good. 

He wasn't specific, but nonesuch00 mentioned above cards costing $600, so I'm guessing, especially since the guy is a studio animator that there are really high end cards that cost a lot more than $200... (And by "studio" I mean like Pixar or something, not Daz Studio LOL)

It really depends on what kind of scenes you make, and want to make. How many characters are in your typical scenes? What about backgrounds? And at what pixel size? When it comes to Iray, there seriously is no such thing as overkill. Even the most beastly gpu's can run out of memory on scenes that are not really that big. There is a reason why big studios use CPU based rendering for movies and things, GPUs just don't cut it for them when they do works that run in the hundreds of GB. I can easily go past my 970's 4gb with just 2 G3 characters in an environment. Maybe 3 if I push it. But, a 970 can be a good deal at $150. If you tend to make simple scenes, then sure, a 970 might be a good card for you.

Personally, and this is my opinion, I think a 1070 would be a great solution. As stated above, you don't even need a very good PC, just one that can run it. (For that matter, you don't need a good PC for many GPUs, just to be clear here.) With your connections in LA, maybe somebody might even give you their old PC. Surely somebody in LA has some old PC parts that don't have a home. They certainly are not going to sell PCs with parts from 2007, so maybe they'll hook you up and let you take it off their hands for $50. As long as it has PCIe, a decent power supply (500 or so) and enough physical space (these GPUs can be pretty huge, so its a common mistake to not have enough space for one!) then you can roll with that for a while. Then you could pick up a GPU, I keep saying 1070, but hey, maybe a 970 from ebay would be ok. So how much would that be, if you had that hypothetical hook up, it would only be a bit over $200. It certainly would not be a beast system, but it would be able to handle Iray. It could get you by until you figure out what you want to do. The 970 would not be useless, if you do buy a newer system, you could pop it in that. If you bought a newer GPU, you could even run both of them, like I have done. At any rate, it could be one way to jump into the wild and woolly and wonderful world of PC. That's what makes PC great, IMO, it can be absolutely anything you want it to be, and built with countless combinations of parts.

Maybe that dude you talked to could hook you up with something. I'm betting he isn't selling those old parts to anybody, he might be happy to get rid of them and just charge you a fee to snap them together.

You have a ton of options for how to tackle this. You can do whatever works for you. Just don't buy a slimline or micro PC, you need that space for the GPUs!

There is a Micro Center in Orange, about an hour from LA. Micro Center is like the Toys R Us of electronics (it was founded by Radio Shack employees)...at least that's how I feel when I walk into one. Sometimes they have open box deals and refurbs that aren't too bad. They do have good deals on CPUs and especially when bought with a motherboard. They often have CPU-motherboard bundles that are $40 off.That's where I got my CPU and motherboard (just not in California.)

 

I don't even bother trying to fix the eyes. I just use eyes from another character in my runtime. The only exception was Bowie, for obvious reasons. I used a closeup picture of his eyes to create a new texture for Daz. If the eye texture FG gives me is almost ok, then I might try to work with it in GIMP.

 

Thanks, I'll Google Micro Connection in the morning and see if it's not too far and call them to get to a price quote first. I'm going to need a monitor too and figure out where to put it, I'm still using my Mac with  32GB RAM and a 27 inch screen as my main computer. This would be just for Daz rendering really, so I want to keep the price as low as possible. I really hate Windows as an OS. Oh and I already asked that guy if he sold old computers and he said no, there's no money in it, he's purely a repair guy. I'm still going to look into render farms too because that could be a better option for me. At a convention, someone quoted me 2 cents a minute and if people are doing 4 minute renders, but that just seems too good to be true and I don't remember the name of the company, they had a booth at Siggraph and I don't know where I put their info.

As far as using celebs in FG, I plan to do a lot of postwork, I'm way better at Photoshop than DS and I'll be using it more for artistic portraits rather than 3D use, so I can always fix the eyes in post. I tried using another character's eyes in a render but it looked too fake, I'd rather use the real actor's eyes and fix them in Photoshop. Mostly I'll be using FG for new original character creation, especially for realism, because now all regular Genesis characters look fake to me after seeing what FG can do! So far FG seems great for stills, but I haven't fully tested it for expressions, but many regular Genesis characters don't take expressions well either, at least not as well as V4 did... 

Wonderland

FSMCDesigns said:

Another fun one for me. Riggs from Friday Night Lights.

I've never seen the show and have no idea what he looks like, but as far as realism, that looks amazing. Where are you finding such high res photos?

Jay Jay_1264499

FSMCDesigns said:

Thanks Jay, I used G3M as I don't have access to G3M due to using the trial version. I also don't have any G2M morphs since G3M is my goto male figure, so it could have been better with some more detailed morphs and matching bump, normal and spec maps.

That image took about 15 minutes to do. Load the image, select the dots, check the final face, export, apply morph and textures, add the shirt, try and find a hair similar to the original image, pose it similar to the original image and there you go. I find that I get a good morph/texture about one out of three I try

Thanks for the reply and info. Hopefully I shall be able to spend more time on it today.

Wonderland

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

Personally, I've always seen FG and other face generating tools to be useful more for coming up with similar characters rather than exact copies of famous people.  Famous faces are fun to do, but not much else.  If I want a character that has similar features to such and such an actor, I'll use their photo as a model, then use a different texture or at least an altered one to come up with a new character.  I consider FG to be a way to do character modeling without having to learn Zbrush or another 3D modeling program.  It does the heavy lifting, while I do the details.  Seen this way, it doesn't really matter if I get perfect copies of a photo face, as long as what I end up with looks like a good character.  I've ofter got 2 or 3 character faces from a single photo because slightly different point placement in FG can often greatly alter the output.

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

I agree. The celeb stuff for me would not be for character creation but for artistic portraits to be enhanced later in Photoshop. I do want them to be recognizable as the celebrity, but it will eventually be a digitally painted portrait, not a photoreal one. The pose and hair I gave her is completely different from the original photo and actually looks nothing like it, but I think managed to get it to look like her enough, I hope, that when completed as a portrait, with eyes fixed and all, people will say "Oh, that's Emma Stone!" although if they Google images of her, there will be nothing like it on the internet...

nicstt

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

Personally, I've always seen FG and other face generating tools to be useful more for coming up with similar characters rather than exact copies of famous people.  Famous faces are fun to do, but not much else.  If I want a character that has similar features to such and such an actor, I'll use their photo as a model, then use a different texture or at least an altered one to come up with a new character.  I consider FG to be a way to do character modeling without having to learn Zbrush or another 3D modeling program.  It does the heavy lifting, while I do the details.  Seen this way, it doesn't really matter if I get perfect copies of a photo face, as long as what I end up with looks like a good character.  I've ofter got 2 or 3 character faces from a single photo because slightly different point placement in FG can often greatly alter the output.

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

It seems rude to me to copy their exact (even close) likeness; especially using photographs of their skin. Doing people that know in advance and can consent is different.

But for characters, it is great.

Jay Jay_1264499

nicstt said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

Personally, I've always seen FG and other face generating tools to be useful more for coming up with similar characters rather than exact copies of famous people.  Famous faces are fun to do, but not much else.  If I want a character that has similar features to such and such an actor, I'll use their photo as a model, then use a different texture or at least an altered one to come up with a new character.  I consider FG to be a way to do character modeling without having to learn Zbrush or another 3D modeling program.  It does the heavy lifting, while I do the details.  Seen this way, it doesn't really matter if I get perfect copies of a photo face, as long as what I end up with looks like a good character.  I've ofter got 2 or 3 character faces from a single photo because slightly different point placement in FG can often greatly alter the output.

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

It seems rude to me to copy their exact (even close) likeness; especially using photographs of their skin. Doing people that know in advance and can consent is different.

But for characters, it is great.

Yes I do know what you mean. For me this going to be great for my comic work though so I generate loads of extra random characters. I found the ethnicity tab very clever.

FSMCDesigns

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

 

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

I disagree. there is already a product out, much cheaper for random character generation - Simtenero Randomizer http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-randomizer So for me to invest in FG, it really needs to bring it on the creation of actual people more than the random aspect

FSMCDesigns

Wonderland said:

I've never seen the show and have no idea what he looks like, but as far as realism, that looks amazing. Where are you finding such high res photos?

Thanks. I just look at google search with specific search parameters, wallpaper sites, paparazzi sites

ANGELREAPER1972

done a few different versions of them using faceshop so here's my first go of recreating my brother and sister with facegen

http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/311666

 

Taoz

nonesuch00 said:

grinch2901 said:

samurle said:

grinch2901 said:

The challenge of FaceGen, from what I've seen so far, is that it does a decent job on getting the facial geometry more or less lined up properly but the rest of the head can be disproportionate.  It seems it works better for men, which is where I did all my testing.  But once I started trying to make females, the face shape when seen in, for example, 3/4 profile was way off. Like the side of the head pushed out and forward and so instead of seeing that nice taper of a femenine jaw line I was getting big square faces.  Overall effect was that it didn't really look  like the female I was trying to create at all.  For men this seems less a problem, as well as original characters since you have no preconceived notions on what they should look like.

 

Are these observations before or after the face is exported to Daz Studio?

Before the export, I think the face looks spot on.  After export, the face has changed.  So, what you see is not exactly what you get.  I think this is because FaceGen uses its own 3D head model, and when it maps that over to DS, some features are lost.

Here's an example. Result in FaceGen looks fntastic.  Transfer to G3F is off. Eyes completely different shape, nose different, mouth different.  Still looks like a pretty girl, just not the same girl.

They differences you site are mostly down to texture and the actual face is reversed from what you are used to seeing in photographs. Pay attentention to the assymetry of her chin for example.

On a side note I went to the Göthe Institut in Düsseldorf when the 2000 World's Fair was in Hannover and they had this contraption that let one see their mirror reflection so that it was not reversed so that it was like how other people saw them rather than how they were used to seeing themselves and it caused some people to run away panicked.

Try to take a render you have worked on for a while and which you think looks good (or any picture you like and have looked at for a long time), and then mirror it. It just looks wrong in some way (at least it does to me). Maybe it's the "first impression" thing that's in play here.

 

 

BlueIrene

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

I agree with this. I've got the Simtenero Randomiser (mentioned a couple of posts later by FSMCDesigns, I can't multi-quote) and love it, but it relies on morphs you already own. This is not a lot of good to you if you've got a sudden need for an Asian G3F and the G3 male and female morphs are languishing in your wishlist at a combined price that's half the cost of the sale price of Facegen. As well as creating face shapes from a photo, Facegen can create male and female face shapes, African face shapes, East Asian face shapes, South Asian face shapes, European face shapes or any combination of them, and you can tweak almost every aspect of them individually afterwards in the program to make them look more/less older or more/less monstrous/realistic etc. You can't do any of that with the Randomiser unless you already own the relevant morphs. These will have had to be bought individually for each generation, male and female, unless you own the required version of GenX, whereasFacegen lets you apply your shapes to Genesis, G2M/F and G3M/F.

There's already a ton of value there, and you can combine morphs you already own with your newly-created face shape once you're in Daz Studio (step forward Zev0's ageing morphs and feel the love! :) ) .

The textures applied to the skins are more trouble than they're worth in my view as long as they insist on the daft practice of drawing eyelashes on eyelids, but it takes no time at all to create an untextured version of your character when you create the textured version, and blend the two skins together around the eyes in Photoshop. Alternatively, you can just create the untextured version (which will often stand well enough on it's own if yours is a young or background character) and make your own modifications to it. You can apply these skins to existing shapes too, or use them in conjunction with shapes created by the Randomiser. More characters than we know what to do with, but I imagine what will really complete our virtual 'character creation suite' will be the release of the next version of Skin Builder. If you're only working with Genesis or G2M/F and have the patience for the current version, that one pretty much completes it now.

As far as celebs go, I enjoyed creating my footballers and Mrs Becks and just did it to see if it could be done, but that's not really what I bought the program for. I expect most celebrities are fiercely protective of their likenesses and would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone using them commercially, and I haven't got the energy for that kind of thing. If you can find a way of using them without inviting legal challenges then your next challenge is to find an image of them not smiling - easier said than done when their livelihoods depend on them putting their most positive faces forward (unless we're talking Mrs Becks!) and most have mouthfuls of expensive dental work that they're eager to flash.

The ability to create a convincing likeness of somebody's face obviously does add extra money-making opportunities for those willing to pursue them, though. 'Want a 3D model of yourself? Look no further!', 'Send a unique Christmas card featuring you and your family in this festive Victorian toy shop!' or 'Let me digitally bring to life your dead relative!' etc.

Facegen isn't without it's flaws (I'm still struggling to get past the eyelashes on eyelids thing!), but in my view the benefits far outweigh them.

Wonderland

Astracadia said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

I agree with this. I've got the Simtenero Randomiser (mentioned a couple of posts later by FSMCDesigns, I can't multi-quote) and love it, but it relies on morphs you already own. This is not a lot of good to you if you've got a sudden need for an Asian G3F and the G3 male and female morphs are languishing in your wishlist at a combined price that's half the cost of the sale price of Facegen. As well as creating face shapes from a photo, Facegen can create male and female face shapes, African face shapes, East Asian face shapes, South Asian face shapes, European face shapes or any combination of them, and you can tweak almost every aspect of them individually afterwards in the program to make them look more/less older or more/less monstrous/realistic etc. You can't do any of that with the Randomiser unless you already own the relevant morphs. These will have had to be bought individually for each generation, male and female, unless you own the required version of GenX, whereasFacegen lets you apply your shapes to Genesis, G2M/F and G3M/F.

There's already a ton of value there, and you can combine morphs you already own with your newly-created face shape once you're in Daz Studio (step forward Zev0's ageing morphs and feel the love! :) ) .

The textures applied to the skins are more trouble than they're worth in my view as long as they insist on the daft practice of drawing eyelashes on eyelids, but it takes no time at all to create an untextured version of your character when you create the textured version, and blend the two skins together around the eyes in Photoshop. Alternatively, you can just create the untextured version (which will often stand well enough on it's own if yours is a young or background character) and make your own modifications to it. You can apply these skins to existing shapes too, or use them in conjunction with shapes created by the Randomiser. More characters than we know what to do with, but I imagine what will really complete our virtual 'character creation suite' will be the release of the next version of Skin Builder. If you're only working with Genesis or G2M/F and have the patience for the current version, that one pretty much completes it now.

As far as celebs go, I enjoyed creating my footballers and Mrs Becks and just did it to see if it could be done, but that's not really what I bought the program for. I expect most celebrities are fiercely protective of their likenesses and would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone using them commercially, and I haven't got the energy for that kind of thing. If you can find a way of using them without inviting legal challenges then your next challenge is to find an image of them not smiling - easier said than done when their livelihoods depend on them putting their most positive faces forward (unless we're talking Mrs Becks!) and most have mouthfuls of expensive dental work that they're eager to flash.

The ability to create a convincing likeness of somebody's face obviously does add extra money-making opportunities for those willing to pursue them, though. 'Want a 3D model of yourself? Look no further!', 'Send a unique Christmas card featuring you and your family in this festive Victorian toy shop!' or 'Let me digitally bring to life your dead relative!' etc.

Facegen isn't without it's flaws (I'm still struggling to get past the eyelashes on eyelids thing!), but in my view the benefits far outweigh them.

I have Simtenero Randomizer too which is great for creating characters for your own use, but you can't create commercial characters because you are relying on Daz and/or PA characters as a base and, at the end, the character still looks a G3 character. FaceGen moves it out of the obvious Daz character realm and can be used as a merchant resource with the supplied textures or your own (not celeb photos!)

As far as celebs suing you, I think because they are public figures, there is a certain leeway with what you can do with their images, including creating art and satire with their image, but you can get in trouble for other things, especially having them endorsing a product or involved in acts of sex or violence, which is why creating a 3D version of them for sale could probably create legal problems for the creator and anyone who purchased it. Creating 2D original art with it is less likely to cause problems. A non-public figure could actually sue you more easily, if you use their likeness without permission.

Wonderland

ANGELREAPER1972 said:

done a few different versions of them using faceshop so here's my first go of recreating my brother and sister with facegen

http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/311666

 

They make great characters! Your sister kind of reminds me of Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica!

nonesuch00

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then...  Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

By the time I can afford anything in $1000 and up range, I'm sure even more new cards will be available...  I was hoping my two year-old Windows laptop could take an NVIDIA card, but apparently not.  Somebody directed me to a site where there is a way to add an external NVIDIA card to a Mac, but that was around $900 too. Everything is way out of my price range right now.

Basically to avoid paying out $1000 every 2 years you have to buy a desktop. I have a 6 year old laptop I paid $125 and upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it was just a stopgap solution. I will this summer pay the $449 for the Acer PC or if it's competitively priced with the Acer, the AMD Ryzen powered PC, that alone will increase my CPU render speeds from 2 times to 4 times faster. I will upgrade the RAM to 32GB too, like you however, I am very hestitant to fork out another $375 - $600 for a video card, be it nVidia or AMD, so I'll have to wait and see.

 

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then...  Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

By the time I can afford anything in $1000 and up range, I'm sure even more new cards will be available...  I was hoping my two year-old Windows laptop could take an NVIDIA card, but apparently not.  Somebody directed me to a site where there is a way to add an external NVIDIA card to a Mac, but that was around $900 too. Everything is way out of my price range right now.

Basically to avoid paying out $1000 every 2 years you have to buy a desktop. I have a 6 year old laptop I paid $125 and upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it was just a stopgap solution. I will this summer pay the $449 for the Acer PC or if it's competitively priced with the Acer, the AMD Ryzen powered PC, that alone will increase my CPU render speeds from 2 times to 4 times faster. I will upgrade the RAM to 32GB too, like you however, I am very hestitant to fork out another $375 - $600 for a video card, be it nVidia or AMD, so I'll have to wait and see.

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

Well it is if you are only going to do renders. Howeverm the cheap most current PC that has at least 4 cores and is upgradable to 32GB or more RAM is still desirable.

I am making animations and games for I will probably buy the nVidia GTX 1080 even though I will first finish the animations at lower reslution before spending the money for a 1080 though. Maybe they'll be cheaper then.

After buying the 1080 since it's at 4K they'd have to do something really bigger speed wise to get me to upgrade for a long time. They approach the limit that eyes can see pixels in these screen close up.

BeeMKay

Whenever I do a test morph, the eyeball, iris and pupils look horribly distorted when I apply a regular skin. Any ideas how to fix that and give the poor peeps the normal eyes?

Jay Jay_1264499

I'm finding the eyes are ok. My only problem is that none of the morphs look like how they do in FaceGen so end up doing a ton of altering in daz which makes me think is this software worth it after all,??? I can only get a half reasonable morph in Gen 1. Forget it if I want to use genesis 2 and 3

Tottallou

 

BeeMKay said:

Whenever I do a test morph, the eyeball, iris and pupils look horribly distorted when I apply a regular skin. Any ideas how to fix that and give the poor peeps the normal eyes?

In many cases you can correct this with the Geometry Editor - I do the following:

Mark the morph from facegen as Favorite in Parameters & Hide the models head with the eyeball icon

Switch to geometry editor tool & use select by Vertex Selection

Select the eyes by going to select by facegroup - leye reye

Still in Geometry Tool choose - Clear Selected Deltas From Favorites

That gets rid of the morphs on the eyes themselves but in some cases still leaves them looking odd - You can then fiddle with the sliders or send the genesis to a modelling program to fix that part

Once you are happy with the results you can resave the morph in the usual way (Set it to 0 then save as - support asset - morph asset)

If anyone has found a better way I hope they will post it as easy is good :)

BlueIrene

Wonderland said:

Astracadia said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

 

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE  rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet. 

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing. 

If all a user wants to do with FG is copy celebrities, it works pretty well.  But, I think it's real value is as a new character creator.  Combine FG with Figure Metrics and some new skins, and you have a character creation suite.

I agree with this. I've got the Simtenero Randomiser (mentioned a couple of posts later by FSMCDesigns, I can't multi-quote) and love it, but it relies on morphs you already own. This is not a lot of good to you if you've got a sudden need for an Asian G3F and the G3 male and female morphs are languishing in your wishlist at a combined price that's half the cost of the sale price of Facegen. As well as creating face shapes from a photo, Facegen can create male and female face shapes, African face shapes, East Asian face shapes, South Asian face shapes, European face shapes or any combination of them, and you can tweak almost every aspect of them individually afterwards in the program to make them look more/less older or more/less monstrous/realistic etc. You can't do any of that with the Randomiser unless you already own the relevant morphs. These will have had to be bought individually for each generation, male and female, unless you own the required version of GenX, whereasFacegen lets you apply your shapes to Genesis, G2M/F and G3M/F.

There's already a ton of value there, and you can combine morphs you already own with your newly-created face shape once you're in Daz Studio (step forward Zev0's ageing morphs and feel the love! :) ) .

The textures applied to the skins are more trouble than they're worth in my view as long as they insist on the daft practice of drawing eyelashes on eyelids, but it takes no time at all to create an untextured version of your character when you create the textured version, and blend the two skins together around the eyes in Photoshop. Alternatively, you can just create the untextured version (which will often stand well enough on it's own if yours is a young or background character) and make your own modifications to it. You can apply these skins to existing shapes too, or use them in conjunction with shapes created by the Randomiser. More characters than we know what to do with, but I imagine what will really complete our virtual 'character creation suite' will be the release of the next version of Skin Builder. If you're only working with Genesis or G2M/F and have the patience for the current version, that one pretty much completes it now.

As far as celebs go, I enjoyed creating my footballers and Mrs Becks and just did it to see if it could be done, but that's not really what I bought the program for. I expect most celebrities are fiercely protective of their likenesses and would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone using them commercially, and I haven't got the energy for that kind of thing. If you can find a way of using them without inviting legal challenges then your next challenge is to find an image of them not smiling - easier said than done when their livelihoods depend on them putting their most positive faces forward (unless we're talking Mrs Becks!) and most have mouthfuls of expensive dental work that they're eager to flash.

The ability to create a convincing likeness of somebody's face obviously does add extra money-making opportunities for those willing to pursue them, though. 'Want a 3D model of yourself? Look no further!', 'Send a unique Christmas card featuring you and your family in this festive Victorian toy shop!' or 'Let me digitally bring to life your dead relative!' etc.

Facegen isn't without it's flaws (I'm still struggling to get past the eyelashes on eyelids thing!), but in my view the benefits far outweigh them.

I have Simtenero Randomizer too which is great for creating characters for your own use, but you can't create commercial characters because you are relying on Daz and/or PA characters as a base and, at the end, the character still looks a G3 character. FaceGen moves it out of the obvious Daz character realm and can be used as a merchant resource with the supplied textures or your own (not celeb photos!)

I thought of that afterwards too, and as an experiment decided to see what I could come up with using FaceGen and the few merchant resources I have available. I started off in FaceGen by clicking the 'random' button a few times until I came up with a female face shape that echoed the doe-eyed and pouty look so beloved of the Daz store, generated a G3F morph and took the untextured FaceGen skin into Photoshop, where I removed the brows and replaced them with some from Hinky Punk's Build-A-Babe product. I added a smattering of freckles and a couple of moles from Build-A-Babe, and then blended in the lips with those from the skin supplied with Build-A-Babe to add a bit of texture. Bump and spec maps were created with the Photoshop actions that come with Build-A-Babe, and the eyes were re-surfaced with mats from Zev0's 'Growing Up'. All this was done during the half hour it took my daughter to make us dinner.

I'd be the first to agree that there's nothing special about the end result, but I've seen worse selling in the store and have bought worse in the past too. I have no real interest in selling characters, just in making them for me so that I don't have to buy any more, but for those that do I imagine FaceGen would pay for itself pretty quickly. You'd need to do a few variants with different coloured eyes, make-ups and maybe something quirky like a tattoo to give your character sales appeal, but even that wouldn't take too long.

I've done such a lot and had so much fun with FaceGen over the last couple of days that it seems like ages ago since I first saw that underwhelming product page for it with two not particularly informative images and thought 'For that money? You're having a laugh.' I'm glad I found the trial though, thanks to this thread, and ended up buying it. No regrets whatsoever here.

 

BeeMKay

Tottallou said:

 

BeeMKay said:

Whenever I do a test morph, the eyeball, iris and pupils look horribly distorted when I apply a regular skin. Any ideas how to fix that and give the poor peeps the normal eyes?

In many cases you can correct this with the Geometry Editor - I do the following:

Mark the morph from facegen as Favorite in Parameters & Hide the models head with the eyeball icon

Switch to geometry editor tool & use select by Vertex Selection

Select the eyes by going to select by facegroup - leye reye

Still in Geometry Tool choose - Clear Selected Deltas From Favorites

That gets rid of the morphs on the eyes themselves but in some cases still leaves them looking odd - You can then fiddle with the sliders or send the genesis to a modelling program to fix that part

Once you are happy with the results you can resave the morph in the usual way (Set it to 0 then save as - support asset - morph asset)

If anyone has found a better way I hope they will post it as easy is good :)

Er...  I can follow you up to "select by vertex group". From there, it falls apart. I can only select one region at a time, and it only allows me to "Assign to Target Group"... and nowhere in the dropdown menus, I fing the "clear selected Deltas... Sorry for being stupid here.

Tottallou

Its most likely my bad explanation & missing parts out :(

You need to be in the Geometry Editor then right click on the model & go to

Geometry Selection - Select By - Face Groups - leye

You need to do this part twice (once for each eye)

Once it looks like this you can right click again & use clear selected deltas

 

Richard Haseltine

Select the eyes from the Tool Sttings pane by clicking the +es, then right-click in the viewport Geometry Selection>Convert Selection>Convert to Vertex Selection. then do the remove deltas

BeeMKay

Still stupid here... I manged to select both eyes, but where do I find the "clear selected deltas"? There's nothing in the right-click menu, i checked all of its sub-points.

Tottallou

It should be under Morph Editing (underneath geometry assignment option)

BeeMKay

Ah... there's only"Subdivision Weight" below geometry assignment. Is that option perhaps not available in all styles?

Tottallou

Are you sure you have Vertex Selection as I notice if on edges that it is as you describe?

I don't know if it changes for different layouts - I am using the latest 4.9.3.166 if that makes a difference

 

 

BeeMKay

Yes, that did the trick. I was using 4.8, and it just wasn't there. I fired up the Beta now, and there it is.

Thank you!

Odaa

Make sure you have "show sub items" turned on in parameters. I couldn't get my facegen morphdials to show up until I did that.

Kev914

I noticed that the nostrils are white after I applied the textures. I didn't see where they said to apply any of the textures to that area. Did I miss it? I suppose I could look at another figure and see what texture was applied there and do the same.

I'm also wondering why there are multiple textures for the eyelashes for some figures, but the one I checked only used a texture in the opacity channel. I ended up setting up my eyelashes the same way.

But all in all, I'm liking this program!

ANGELREAPER1972

Wonderland said:

ANGELREAPER1972 said:

done a few different versions of them using faceshop so here's my first go of recreating my brother and sister with facegen

http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/311666

 

They make great characters! Your sister kind of reminds me of Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica!

thank you yeah I think they do make good charcters done a few renders using headshop and photomanipulations of them now haven't quite got them 100% correct especially in the shaping but still happy with the results and that's the main thing to me using facegen for new textures just like we do with bought stuff we mix and match differnt textures on different shapes for endless characters of course sometimes you do want to actually recreate the actual person and this one is pretty close and again in headshop I have recreated a few friends and my mother in a few renders  but with facegen don't have to edit out black lines and other stuff like I did with the other plus you can create matching full body skin tone with facegen hs is still good but I like fg more. You know I didn't notice that she looked like Kattee here so had to look up some pics to compare and your right she does though in real life don't think she does like said didn't get her 100% accurate here or John either but I still like the results