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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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Some people told me in my last post that the chracters I had posted all looked very similar or words to that effect. Someone said you can spot a CC character from a mile off.
I need to thank all of you for the criticism. At the end of the day, this is how you get better. I ended up posting a whole bunch more characters to show that you really can make unique looks in CC that aren't all more of the same, but my first post showed major characters from my novel. I need them too look good.
Upon looking at the three main characters I presented in the first post, I realized I had made the mistake of too strongly restricting myself to art-class ratios. The ratios aren't wrong. They produce a reasonable looking person very quickly in almost any media. However, rather than using them as strong guidelines, I stuck too close to them. They are very good first order approximations, but reality goes out well beyond second and third order if you want to make something that looks unique.
I spent the last couple days thinking very hard about what it is in my mind that makes each of those characters look like those characters. Was it the way her eyes and nose together looked from a certain angle? Her brow, her lips etc... Then I went nuts using almost every slider to subtly break out of the ratios I had baked in and saw where it took me. As a result, I feel each of them are much better and also, they are very different ladies.
Now some notes on how to do unique characters:
1. You really have no choice but to have ultimate morphs, headshot and skin gen. Otherwise, for certain, a face that starts out as say Katherine, is going to stay mostly and recognizably, Katherine.
2. The different sliders interact with each other. Understaning how altering eye-corner hieght inteacts with eye corner angle for example, and how dozens of other connected morphs change each other is essential. This can only really be learned by experiment.
3. I didn't do this for any of the above shots because I thought it would be cheating, but there is nothing stopping you from picking an actor or actress that you like, getting a nice photo of them from the web and making a model using headshot. You then have a head to blend into any other work you do.
4. There is nothing stopping you from importing an attractive head from DAZ or other places. I also didn't do that for the above re-works. I saw it as a challenge to do it using just CC sliders.
5. Always accept criticism gracefully. There are sometimes when you have whatever vision and it really doesn't matter what anyone says. There are other times - most times - like if a couple people point out that several of your characters look too similar, they probably do, and you aren't seeing the forest for the trees.
So thank you for your critiques!
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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Hi No offense but you seem to clearly have a preferred "type" when it comes to female facial features that may be heavily biasing your perception The nose and mouth shapes of these new renders are essentially the same. they still look like Blood relatives.. even siblings I picked a few random character presets from my Daz Genesis 8 female content and tossed out some quick portraits in the FREE Iray engine that ships with Daz studio As you can see, they look nothing like each other. I am given to understand that Iclone 8/CC4 will offer much more facial morph variety which will be good because the current CC3+ figures are quite lacking in this area.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
Hi No offense but you seem to clearly have a preferred "type" when it comes to female facial features that may be heavily biasing your perception The nose and mouth shapes of these new renders are essentially the same. they still look like Blood relatives.. even siblings I picked a few random character presets from my Daz Genesis 8 female content and tossed out some quick portraits in the FREE Iray engine that ships with Daz studio As you can see, they look nothing like each other. I am given to understand that Iclone 8/CC4 will offer much more facial morph variety which will be good because the current CC3+ figures are quite lacking in this area.
It is certainly true that I have certain preferred types. Most people do and most people gravitate to them when they want to make someone look pretty. I am not certain how much this is biasing me however. I am also not certain what you are ultimately trying to get at. You seem to be cranky at CC. My original intent was to show that you really can make unique faces using CC and to discuss ways to do this.
I think perhaps the models you chose might also show some of your biases.
It's interesting that you chose the three models you did when discussing mouths and noses. It is certainly easy to make thicker, more downturned noses, like the ones you presented in CC as well as DAZ. It is cretainly easy to make smaller eyes. Ironically, the ones you present all have essentially the same nose - particularly the first two, going from left to right. The nose tips of the first and third have the same structures. The overall shape of the middle nose is a broader version of the first and the third one is really just a thinner version of the first with the nostrils raised. All have almost no variation of the lines of their ridges or thier relationsips to the cheeks.
I am all about eyes in general. All three of the models you chose have very simple, and small eyes with very little variation from the pinched oval of most DAZ characters.
Another thing that all of the models you presented share is unrealistically wide mouths. In real life, mouth openings that wide would appear deformed if any of them started to open their mouths or eat, particularly if they have very flat faces like the first two. The anatomy is just off. I mean its wrong unless you are going for making a movie monster. The middle one is by far the worst in this case. She could fit a grapefruit in there. I can only imagine that her jaw unhinges to accomdate prey.
Now going back to noses, to be fair to me, one nose is a button nose with many curves and a very narrow bridge, one is mostly straight with slight bump in the nose ridge and much wider and wholly different relations to the cheeks and forehead, and the third one is admittedly a little between those two, but has the widest upper bridge and the highest bridge. They also all have different nostrils. What they have in common is that they all turn up. Yes I like that look.
All of your noses turn down. There is nothing wrong with liking that look either. But in terms of making characters, all of the DAZ ones you presented are actually much simpler in terms of details and while they look very different, they do so at the expense of realistic human anatomy.
Finally, trying to pimp DAZ's IRAY as better than CC's is not well served by those images. I'm not sure why you chose to throw that in, but if you are going to do so, pick some images with some more complex lighting and skin maps to show it off. I think that using DAZ rendering, one could do much better than what you presented, but from those shots, it isn't even close to what can be done with CC or IClone.
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By animagic - 3 Years Ago
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There is also no reason why the DAZ look, if that's your thing, couldn't be replicated in CC. To me even that looks too polished, which has been my long-time problem with DAZ.
With Headshot I have been able to create a variety of characters that don't look the same, so it is certainly possible. I showed that in another post.
One thing to try to get past is symmetry. 3D created faces often have too much symmetry and they are too pretty.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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animagic (2/4/2022)
There is also no reason why the DAZ look, if that's your thing, couldn't be replicated in CC. To me even that looks too polished, which has been my long-time problem with DAZ.
With Headshot I have been able to create a variety of characters that don't look the same, so it is certainly possible. I showed that in another post.
One thing to try to get past is symmetry. 3D created faces often have too much symmetry and they are too pretty.
That's one reason why I put so many little subtle asymmetries in my shots. Please particularly look at the eyes of the third character.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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animagic (2/4/2022)
There is also no reason why the DAZ look, if that's your thing, couldn't be replicated in CC. To me even that looks too polished, which has been my long-time problem with DAZ.
With Headshot I have been able to create a variety of characters that don't look the same, so it is certainly possible. I showed that in another post.
One thing to try to get past is symmetry. 3D created faces often have too much symmetry and they are too pretty.
I never forked over the money for all the DAZ sliders. I do my avatar modeling almost exclusively in CC - where I ended up spending my money. I am really not certain what the limitations of fully rigged DAZ vs. fully rigged CC are. I am certain that I have seen nothing in DAZ that I couldn't do in CC. I'm not writing that as a challenge, but I am interested to see something from DAZ that you really couldn't do in CC for people - outside of genitals.
For that matter, if you really, really want genitals on your characters, there is Hair Tool in Blender. Just make an appropriate patch and mount it as cloth. You can easily import morphs from DAZ for female parts and you can easily sculpt some "add ons" for males in a variety of other programs. Speaking just technically, there aren't enough polys in either CC or DAZ base avatars to accurately morph female physiology close up, but unless you are making a gynocolgical reference or porn, why would you want to?
I only bring this up because having those bits is the one thing DAZ does that CC really doesn't
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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I agree with Job that the OP should really consider purchasing the $200 USD the headshot plugin to get away from the obvious default "CC3 girl" look to his female characters. I used the $50 USD "Face transfer" plugin for Daz studio to first apply this Thanos face to a Daz Genesis 8 male and then imported him into CC3 via the transformer. and then exported out him to blender Via the Free pipeline tool So there are ways to get variety in your Character looks
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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but I am interested to see something from DAZ that you really couldn't do in CC for people - outside of genitals. Realistic joint control morphs and HD facial morphs that transfer to Blender via the Free Diffeomorphic tool.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
I agree with Job that the OP should really consider purchasing the $200 USD the headshot plugin to get away from the obvious default "CC3 girl" look to his female characters.
Uhh... I have headshot and mentioned it as essential in the OP.
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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harris.josephd (2/4/2022)
AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
I agree with Job that the OP should really consider purchasing the $200 USD the headshot plugin to get away from the obvious default "CC3 girl" look to his female characters.
Uhh... I have headshot and mentioned it as essential in the OP.
Then perhaps try for more variety in your source photos... just a suggestion:)
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
harris.josephd (2/4/2022)
AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
I agree with Job that the OP should really consider purchasing the $200 USD the headshot plugin to get away from the obvious default "CC3 girl" look to his female characters.
Uhh... I have headshot and mentioned it as essential in the OP. Then perhaps try for more variety in your source photos... just a suggestion :)
Wow... There is really no need to get cranky. I pointedly didn't use source photos for these. I did use a number of the headshot morphs. I think much would be cleared up by reading my post.
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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Not getting cranky .
I see others getting much more variety with headshot so it has to be matter of the source photos.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
Not getting cranky .
I see others getting much more variety with headshot so it has to be matter of the source photos.
I didn't use source photos. I used headshot sliders only. All three of those avatars are purely made in CC with no outside importing. That was the entire point of the post. If I wanted to use headshot to make Thanos, I am certain I could do it and then export to Blender to incorporate the finer details before re-importing.
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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May I ask why you have paid for a plugin specifically designed to create highly diverse Avatars and even passable Digital doubles of real people and limited yourself to only using morph sliders?
Seems counter intuitive and you certainly would not create Thanos with those extremely limited morph sliders alone so Why not get your hard earned moneys worth out of a plugin that cost more than the base version of Iclone itself??
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
May I ask why you have paid for a plugin specifically designed to create highly diverse Avatars and even passable Digital doubles of real people and limited yourself to only using morph sliders?
Seems counter intuitive and you certainly would not create Thanos with those extremely limited morph sliders alone so Why not get your hard earned moneys worth out of a plugin that cost more than the base version of Iclone itself??
May I ask you a couple of questions?
1. Which of my images "looks obviously like a base CC3+ character," and which base character? I think that's rather unkind, but perhaps I am just not seeing something. Could you post the base character next to one of my women and tell me how they look alike?
2. If you read my post you will see why I didn't use source photos. How was I unclear?
3. Could you please actually read my responses? For example, if I were going to make Thanos, I would need to use Blender to put in the finer details. What was unclear when I said that?
I simply don't understand where you are coming from. It's like you are trying to troll at this point. There's really no reason for it.
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By AutoDidact - 3 Years Ago
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The default CC3 girl in the middle with the basic preveiw render engine in CC3 .
Identical twins/triplets?...absolutely not!!
However Clearly from the same northern European gene pool could pass for sisters or first cousins...? yes that is my subjective opinion.
Nothing wrong with having a preference( I certainly Do). But of the DAZ women I posted, the two brunettes could be anything from Armenian to Italian to latina or Arab, and the redhead could easily be an Irish,scottish or Welsh Character I am not seeing this type of Diversity from people without using the headshot plugin to its full potential.
I have read that the CC4 Avatars have more diversity built in,for those who are upgrading.
BTW the Thanos Blender screenshot is a straight export from CC3 Pipeline tool with no "detailing" beyond adjusting the Subsurface skin settings in the blender pipeline addon panel, to look better in My preferred render engine of EEVEE.
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By harris.josephd - 3 Years Ago
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AutoDidact (2/4/2022)
The default CC3 girl in the middle with the basic preveiw render engine in CC3 .
Identical twins/triplets?...absolutely not!!
However Clearly from the same northern European gene pool
could pass for sisters or first cousins...? yes that is my subjective opinion. Nothing wrong with having a preference( I certainly Do). But of the DAZ women I posted, the two brunettes could be anything from Armenian to Italian to latina or Arab, and the redhead could easily be an Irish,scottish or Welsh Character I am not seeing this type of Diversity from people without using the headshot plugin to its full potential.
I have read that the CC4 Avatars have more diversity built in,for those who are upgrading.
Seriously? I mean seriously? Do you think that people on a CC forum don't know what the base avatars look like? I appriciate that you took some time in CC to try to make a base avatar look a little like one of mine, but the whole point of the OP was to make characters who look radically different from the base using CC! To produce the image you presented that quickly, you probably used head shot on my image - which ironically, by cheating like that, only proves my point.
As to gene pools and diversity, it's interesting that you fail to mention that the first character is clearly mostly of Latin heratige with a few Aisian features - as she is described in my book.
Further, you are correct that the blonde looks Northern European. I was inspired by a woman I know whose ancestors came from Northern France. Getting her grey eyes right took some time. The redhead does not look Scottish or Welsh at all, though I do not understand why people descended from Western Celts or Normans wouldn't count as their own ethnic groups in anycase. She was originally inspired by someone I know who is of Russian Jewish descent. Look at their cheek bones, brows, eyes and noses.
Do you have some bias against white people? Is it possible you think they look the same? From some of your ascerbic comments on this and other threads, it begins to appear that way and it is tiresome.
As to making diverse characters using CC, I will remind you of some other images I posted. These were also made entirely in CC using skin gen and a little GIMP to tweak the textures. So no, if you actually take the time to get good at using CC, you can make anyone. I suggest you stop using headshop as a crutch and learn to make characters from scratch using the tool.
This lady is also inspired by someone I know. She's a very brilliant mathematician.
If you look at the two Asian women below, it is clear that one is striaght up Han Chinese and the other isn't. And yes, I used the first one as the basis to make the second. I was particularly interested in exploring the different ethnic features in the eyes and foreheads and cheeks and jawline. Their noses are essentially the same.
Feel free to post whatever else you want but I really am tired of this.
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