Help us out: faces for soldier heads

[H-Hour]

Isen is working on making some more faces for our soldiers, but he needs good, properly licensed, source material. You can do this for us by proving some simple photos of your face. Please provide a photo from straight in front, one from a slight angle (like the attached image) and one from the side, and Isen can turn your face into a soldier.
It won't look exactly like you, as the pieces have to be adjusted to fit onto the mode.

When you post, please license your photos under GNU GPL 2 or later.

Another way you can help us is by finding good source photos for black, asian, latino or arab men, or any women since us gamers tend to be overwhelmingly male. These photos have to be licensed properly for use in derivative commercial works, which makes this task very hard. Deviantart.com's stock photo section is one place to look, but because people often fail to declare specific licenses, we have to ask the person to license it under an appropriate license. Two that work well for this are GNU GPL 2 or Later and CC-BY-SA 3.0. If you have a DeviantArt account, try putting in an hour going through their stock photo section to see if you can find useful material and sending messages to the authors to ask if they'll license under these licenses for this purpose.

[Latino210]

It's an honour to be the first to answer this call! I've snapped pics of me with and without glasses, use whatever you want. I am a full-blooded Latino but I could easily pass for an Arab with a little tan.

The pics in the "myuglyface.zip" archive are free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

[Isen]

Thanks Latino210 for being first volunteer. I managed to make two simple textures. Here is a preview. If You could send me more detailed pictures (a better quality) it would make a great difference.
As for any other forum member that wish to join our little project, if you dont want to show images to public forum, You can send them directly to me with a PM.

[Crystan]

Great work Isen! Really hoped someone would make new faces.

[Latino210]

Thanks Latino210 for being first volunteer. I managed to make two simple textures. Here is a preview. If You could send me more detailed pictures (a better quality) it would make a great difference.

All right, give me a couple of days to grow my beard back and I will snap some better quality pics.

[krilain]

It's an honour to be the first to answer this call! I've snapped pics of me with and without glasses, use whatever you want. I am a full-blooded Latino but I could easily pass for an Arab with a little tan.

The pics in the "myuglyface.zip" archive are free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Hi Latino and all other guys,

I will surely appear greatly newbie on the here treated question, but I downloaded your zip file and excuse me, discovered photo faces where I was waiting to see digital modeled ones like in-game. I've so 2 questions :
1- is this the type of artwork needed in order to multilply the faces count,
2 - and is there not a standard format more directly adapted, in 3D eventually, or planely mapped like some textures I've already seen in many games ?

Last point , I dont know where are packed the faces today used in game into my UFOAI pakage under windows.   

Thank for your attention.

[H-Hour]

krilain: Isen is taking the source photos provided by myself, Latino and others and turning them into faces mapped onto head models used in the game. All you have to do to help out is take some photos of yourself from straight in front and from the side. Isen can use bits and pieces to fit together onto a head ingame.

There is no standard format for converting a photo into a face in the game. Often direct mapping doesn't work very well and Isen needs to move things around to layout properly on the model.

You will find soldier models in /base/models/soldiers I believe.

[Anarch Cassius]

You can find automapping programs and some don't totally suck... but from a design standpoint that's not good for a game like this. It's good for a game where you can upload an avatar image but it means either including the face maker in UFO AI would be tons of work, or it means processing the files first and putting them in to UFO AI. Which is basically what Isen is doing by hand.

I've a lot of artists and most use generators, prefabs and so on but not one just takes the output and leaves it as is. It always goes through some touch-up work. I wouldn't be surprised if Isen is using algorithms to lay down the basework before finalizing but if you have the option you really can't beat a human going over the final details.

I'll post my photos soon and see how many friends I can convince. I can probably get the people in my gaming group to do it and that includes several girls.

[H-Hour]

I'll post my photos soon and see how many friends I can convince. I can probably get the people in my gaming group to do it and that includes several girls.

Would be great to have more photos, thanks.

[Isen]

I don't use any algorithms and everything is made by hand. It is because pictures I use as a base, are not unify in style and camera angle. I also modyfy mesh while texturing. That is why its easer for me to work individually with every face.
I'm looking forward to lay hands on pictures you will provide

Here is a little preview how it looks like.

[Latino210]

The pics in the "Photos.zip" archive are free; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The resolution is much higher and now I really look like an Arab. Well, I am a Sicilian and probably I have a lot of Arabic ancestors. I cannot wait to see a soldier with my face killing aliens in game!

[krilain]

krilain: Isen is taking the source photos provided by myself, Latino and others and turning them into faces mapped onto head models used in the game. All you have to do to help out is take some photos of yourself from straight in front and from the side. Isen can use bits and pieces to fit together onto a head ingame.

There is no standard format for converting a photo into a face in the game. Often direct mapping doesn't work very well and Isen needs to move things around to layout properly on the model.

You will find soldier models in /base/models/soldiers I believe.

Thank you to be so clear,

You must have understood that i'm not fluent so much in english. That's why I miss often the core of the topics before someone leads me into it.

I quite understand now. But still quite surprised. Once transformed in electronic in-game format how could someone know where the original model came from?

I don't use any algorithms and everything is made by hand. It is because pictures I use as a base, are not unify in style and camera angle. I also modyfy mesh while texturing. That is why its easer for me to work individually with every face.
I'm looking forward to lay hands on pictures you will provide

Here is a little preview how it looks like.

Excuse me again, thanks first for explanations of your work. But for instance I just was into a software page for facial modeling and got this :


I would ask you a technical question. Dont you get such a texture at the end of your converting job? (from real photo to a model)

And if so, isn't that possible to work directly on this substract to make various faces? Why doesn't it work, at least in most cases?

I've no time to test it myself those days, but eventually if this way of work was correct, I would be happy to contribute one future day. That's just painting. Looks funny

(...) I cannot wait to see a soldier with my face killing aliens in game!

Or aliens being killing you

[H-Hour]

I would ask you a technical question. Dont you get such a texture at the end of your converting job? (from real photo to a model)

If you look at any of the head*.png files here, you will see the "skins" for each of our head models. Each model can layout its skin in a different way. If you're interested in learning about this, search for how to "unwrap UV" in modelling programs.

Yes, you can use the same unwrapping and paint some small differences (head01* all use the same model, for instance). But there is a limit to how much real diversity you can achieve without changing the models, which is why Isen both paints and manipulates the model a bit for each head.

[Crystan]

I don't use any algorithms and everything is made by hand. It is because pictures I use as a base, are not unify in style and camera angle. I also modyfy mesh while texturing. That is why its easer for me to work individually with every face.
I'm looking forward to lay hands on pictures you will provide

Here is a little preview how it looks like.

Again, great work!

[krilain]

If you look at any of the head*.png files here, you will see the "skins" for each of our head models. Each model can layout its skin in a different way. If you're interested in learning about this, search for how to "unwrap UV" in modelling programs.

Yes, you can use the same unwrapping and paint some small differences (head01* all use the same model, for instance). But there is a limit to how much real diversity you can achieve without changing the models, which is why Isen both paints and manipulates the model a bit for each head.

Thank you. Quite clear again.

I'm not used with game-making and what interferes too is that I use a lot of Autocad for roads or building questions at work, which is some useless for game-making (unless you intend to make an autoroute map in UFOAI!).

I understand now that Isen takes the problem from the root and I add my encouragements to the others of course. But after a while, hopefuly the amount of faces would just have to get numerous little paintable additions (like a barb addition, the hair or skin color). To summarize my understanding of the process :

• Transform a real head set into a set of 3D models (correctly licensed)
•   Make additions directly on the unwrapped texture (color / pilosity / skin accidents...)