Advice on making faces

[Empress Meg]

Hi there gents,

I wanted to ask how yall go about making faces that are not the same ones day in and day out. It seems like I’ve seen some of these guys I’ve been working on more then the real guys in my life! Any advice or tips on making unique faces in PS? I’ve tried to remove facial hair or change the hair colour/eye colour skin tone and so forth but that just looks like the same dude to me.

I’m not very skilled in drawing the human form on paper, but I’ll try my best to make something decent in PS if anyone has any imput.

Thanks in advance!

Devoirs The Empress

[Publius]

I don't pretend to be an authority on this, but when I do it this is normally how:

-Take a vanilla face texture, blow it up by about 800% or more
-Lay down a base 'skin' layer underneath this one that we can paint onto later
-Google search for various facial items (eyes, ears, mouth, etc.). Place them over the vanilla texture in the appropriate places so we can preserve the dimensions of the face.

• The vanilla texture is going to be very pixelated, we don't want to use that as reference.

-Dodge/Burn the jawline in, delete/hide the vanilla texture as it is no longer needed.
-Adjust the opacity of the reference photos you have now placed on top, and begin to dodge/burn the details of these into the base skin layer created earlier.
-Once you have the facial features added in, place in details like the eyes and hair.

• For the hair I like to make about 5-6 variations each for the head, eyebrows, beard, and mustache. Preserve them in separate layers so you can alternate between them and get a lot of variety out of the same face texture.
  
  • Run a google search for "hair" or "natural" brushes for photoshop, which will be invaluable at this stage. I use the Nagel Series, but there are countless ones to choose from really.

-Once you do this go through and add in any other details you might want to include, like facial paint or earings.

End result is something akin to this:

[scaled down]

Now you just need to scale it down appropriately (which will give you a much cleaner looking texture at that resolution), and the dimensions should be the same as your vanilla UV mapping so it can go straight into your unit texture.

[Halie Satanus]

I use photo's from the net, my subject matter probably isn't in line with what your doing but the principle is the same, though it does it help that I've got 3dMax so I can check them as I go, making them and then viewing in game is probably a drag., if you haven't got Max download Gmax, you can't export models but you can still check your textures work.

If a face doesn't fit strait off tweak it around a bit, cut out the eyes/mouth/nose and put them on a seperate layer, then use the clone tool to erase the original and put the cut out back in a new position, then use the burn tool to shade it in, it's trial and error and some just won't work but when they do it's pretty gratifying.

These are some of mine with the photo's I used to create them. I can't find the original of the second black guy but he's a real person, also take a look at the M2 textures, they look iffy in M2 (imo) because of the models but the textures are good, and the strat textures are already tga dds same as RTW, so no need to convert.

[Empress Meg]

Shucks you two, that was mighty fast. Thank you kindly for your replies. I'll give them a go this weekend and see what I can come up with. I'll let you know how it goes.

Devoirs The Empress

[drak10687]

I remember DirtyPeasent used some face generator that he found on the net... though the faces didn't look very "RTW", but that could be a good thing if thats what you're going for, or you can just edit them as you please. ...I would look for it back in our dev forums, but SCC seems to be down again...

[Empress Meg]

I remember DirtyPeasent used some face generator that he found on the net... though the faces didn't look very "RTW", but that could be a good thing if thats what you're going for, or you can just edit them as you please. ...I would look for it back in our dev forums, but SCC seems to be down again...

Indeed. I've seen a few online as well. They are, well they are what they are. I've fiddled with the faces that already exists in what i am working with and have come up with a decent comprimise. While it is not as perfect as it could be, the new faces I am making look much better then the same three dudes I've been staring at the past couple of months lol.

I'm using the layers options and adding new highlights here and there in hair, or removing hair from the face or adding some in. Even some lsight skin tone changes can make a difference.

Thank you all once again!