Face customization: how was it done?

[Chosker]

I really like the way the face appearance can be edited. This is something found in newer games, but I wonder. How was it done?

I've heard there are two ways of doing it:
1. Using bones. You add bones to the face and make their weights the parts you want to be customizable. Then in-game you allow for those bones to be moved.
2. Deforming the mesh. Somehow you add pointers on how the mesh should be deformed, and the engine does it.

does M&B use this any of this methods? how was this done?

 

[Snodar]

I'd make a texture of how to deform the vertices on the face in a vertex shader along their normal - a neutral gray doesn't modify them at all. Each slider is a texture added to the total. That way you're not wasting bones on stuff which isn't animated; you can have as many sliders as you need. It also allows easy facial animation - just add in another texture. Finally, it allows vertex LOD.

But I doubt M&B does things this way, which is off the top of my head. I'll do a bit of exploring.

 

[DaLagga]

I've seen a few games with this feature, and while M&B does it well, there's another that has to be recongnized for its greatness. Eve Online has the best one that i've seen by far. I actually spent my first 30 minutes of that game just playing with the face creator simply because it was so cool looking.

 

[ipek]

Chosker : welcome to the forums.

About the face generator, your second guess is right. There are vertex keys (obtained by playing with the vertices of the base mesh) for the extremes like eyes placed far apart - eye placed close to eachother. And the code hadles the inbetweens as you might guess.

 

[JohnathanStrange]

The face generator is cool; it'd be even cooler if once I'd edited Borcha's face, it stayed edited.

As it is now, Borcha looks like my high school physics teacher and it's creeping me out!

 

[Vinz Klortho]

The face generator is cool; it'd be even cooler if once I'd edited Borcha's face, it stayed edited.

As it is now, Borcha looks like my high school physics teacher and it's creeping me out!

I will hold this position if you answer the following riddle: If Marnid is going full speed on a charger and knocks down 11 fully armored, dismounted dark knights, determine the mass of a charger in terms of Dark Knights.*

* Hint, use what you know about conservation of momentum.

 

[Sir Saladin]

wow, when I took a course in physics in high school thats when I found out how stupid I really am.