FaceGen software, royalty-free

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This looks rather useful. FaceGen Modeller is a powerful face-creation kit — and it can then apply the face to a low-poly 3D mesh…

“The program gives you tons of parameters to configure, including race, skin, facial areas, and emotions.”

And they’re not joking. There’s just about every tweak and slider you could possibly want, although children are not included on the age slider. But yes, it also has that all-important one-click “Generate a random face” button! And the equally-important rider that…

“you may sell or distribute images, video or sculptures rendered using FaceGen-created models in any way you want.”

The v3.4 free version just does the face creation, but since we already have easy face-to-mesh capability inside iClone that shouldn’t be a problem. As long as you only need the fairly small face images that you can obtain from FaceGen by using screenshots. A FaceGen preview head has full 3D rotation and tilt, and basic zoom. You will need to use Photoshop to erase the small “SI” logo that the free trial stamps on the forehead….

The free trial doesn’t expire, and comes with a small library of both 1024 and 2048-pixel face textures, to be found in C:\Program Files\Singular Inversions\FaceGen Modeller 3.4 Free\Detail

Could also be useful for cartoonists and comic-book artists who want quick reference material to draw over — it can do emotion and caricature.

Of course, a FaceGen-exported head is just a mesh, and you won’t be able to puppeteer it. So these heads are only useful for background extras.

Other similar software:

* the photofit software Faces 4.0, but that only does black and white “police wanted” images.

* Poser‘s Face Room and its ‘random’ ability.

* Argile looks like a fine tool for creating quality meshes from photos of real people.

* iClone itself has a “randomize face” button. As far as I know, CrazyTalk doesn’t have a generative face-generator tool?

* The new Evolver iClone site for creating custom characters. Evolver custom characters can do facial animation once they’re inside iClone.