Does anyone know what software I can use to make a character as good as the photorealistic head in the learn section of the launcher. Fuse, iClone and makehuman aren’t this good.
Best quality is done by an experienced character artist, it’s not a simple thing to do.
“Photorealistic” is such a buzzword that means everything and nothing. You can have a perfect character and with bad lighting it looks like crap. The best and most detailed, realistic characters i have ever seen were made by professionals who do that since decades and often spend months on a single face. Many are made in Maya or 3D studio max. Hair is a completely different topic, but these days there are great plugins like shave, yeti or xgen help a lot. Also a different story is to animate a face or character realistically. And clothing! You could study this a lifetime.
There are also very realistic characters out of the box. Makehuman as freeware is probably on the bottom, but maybe not as bad as you think if you spend some time with it. Here’s a free character i made with it in like 30 minutes:
If you want a really nice grabbag of good characters without spending much effort then look at Daz Studio - Some characters are really detailed with pretty nice textures, already coming close to professional work.
Thanks Darth and Fronze. At the moment I do Archviz and iClone is good for bodies and faces in the mid distance. Though I’d love to make some movies and Unreal is very near to portraying a totally convincing close up of reality. At least for cinematography (where you only ever see the best lighting). I have the scenery, Marvelous designer could be used for close up clothes, it’s just the close up heads I need. Really good photo textures are the key with good normals and displacement etc. I could start at the site 3D.SK and see what’s involved in modeling 3D meshes .No way am I using Maya$$$$$$£££. So Blender might be able to be used. Creating hi res characters is a gaping whole in the market and I would pay for a makehuman/iClone/Daz that makes them easily. However it’s done, inventing an interesting character would be enormously satisfying, in the same way you would describe a character when writing a novel.
Technology isn’t nearly close enough to be able to automate that type of thing, if you want it as high quality as I’m guessing then you’d need to hire a character artist who will sculpt it for you, and then for animation that’s a whole different problem to set up good facial animation.
Since I started the thread I have tried with this and if someone wants to try this too it gets nearly there, and your unique input (perhaps your good at animation) could take it al lthe way. (I definitely haven’t got time I’m renovating a house and can’t be in 2 places at once)
I 1st imported a MakeHuman avatar with skeleton into Blender and made the head a separate mesh with it’s own material. I then assigned the photorealistic head material to the new head in unreal. And wallah!! the task of the artist is revealed. Which is to make a texture that fits the new head mesh. Which is best done from a high def set of photos of a person whose likeness has been copied when modelling the head in Make human. The photos form the basis of the textures placed within the photorealistic head material. The ears could be another mesh and made translucent.
The resulting avatar could use Faceworks to animate. NVIDIA FaceWorks - YouTube
Though the smiling looks pretty awful in this video, but then when we smile we usually keep our mouths closed (mouth open smiling looks creepy) and also that was 2014. It’s 3 years later. Give facial animation a few more years and I think it’ll be there.