Exporting from Facegen

I looked at the program Facegen. I think its a good way to model a head. Now I wonder if I can export the result to something I can use on SL.

You can do it with the customizer (US$299) and a re-distribution license (US$995), or you can find someone that has both those options do it for you for a small fee.

I'm curious as to how these help bring faces into SL. The customizer (it's included with a re-distribution license btw) would let you bring the SL avatar mesh into Facegen, but the only gain I can see would be in texture baking. I'm assuming you'd still need to use SL appearance to edit the head shape and mimic that with Facegen controls? It seems a lot of money for a pretty awkward workflow if you aren't going to be using the rest of Facegen's features.

You could do something just as awkward for free using makehuman and blender

http://www.dedalo-3d.com/
http://www.blender.org/

I didn't mean to suggest that FaceGen would support importing avatar shape distortion into SL. We're pretty much stuck with what is given in appearance settings. I have no idea how FaceGen would function with the SL avatar mannequins inside it's UI either. I personally have not invested any futher than the demo version. My main interest in it would be the texture baking, but since I can get far better results working with the avatar mannequins inside ZBrush and Maya, I have no pressing need for FaceGen.

You're right about the customizer included in the distribution license. That makes sense. It's a shame Linden Lab never thought about adopting the SDK Products technology to SL. There must be a good reason they didn't, although it seems infinitely more intuitive and better than the current slider default texture setup we currently have.

Ok, I wasn't sure if it had gained some features since I last looked at it a year or two ago. I thought you probably meant for texturing due to context of the thread, but with Perl mentioning the model I thought it best to check



Perhaps because Facegen only covers heads. They'd still have had to develop the parameter driven body mesh, so the time saving would have been minimal. Hopefully at some point they'll look at open source alternatives such as the animorph engine behind makehuman for next gen avatars.