Creating a Game Character Face from a Single Portrait

Check out a new approach to character face generation in games described in a paper by J. Lin, Y. Yuan, and Z. Zou. Current character customization systems either require you to manually tweak face attributes for the desired face or have limited freedom.

In this new paper, the team presents an automatic character face creation method that is said to predict both facial shape and texture from a single portrait. They also noted that it can be integrated into most existing 3D games.

"Although 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM) based methods can restore accurate 3D faces from single images, the topology of 3DMM mesh is different from the meshes used in most games," states the team. "To acquire fidelity texture, existing methods require a large amount of face texture data for training, while building such datasets is time-consuming and laborious." 

The research describes a low-cost facial texture acquisition method, a shape transfer algorithm that can transform the shape of a 3DMM mesh to games, and a new pipeline for training 3D game face reconstruction networks. Researchers say that the system is capable of producing detailed and vivid game characters similar to the input portrait, plus eliminate the influence of lighting and occlusions. 

You can find the paper here and the project files there. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.