Creating natural looking faces in games like oblivion, dark souls, etc

[Mar]

I'll come out and say that I'm not fond of the way facegen works.

The faces often have squinty pointy eyes and exaggerated face shapes. The top of the face and cheeksare often very protruding and the At least for the models that come with the program. There are mods for oblivion that do look pretty because they have a nice base model. 

What I'm having trouble working with though is making a face using the sliders in these games. Changing one slider has an impact on the rest of the face and when you go back to change those back again the slider is already at maximum or it makes the face even more fish eyed and unnatural after doing this multiple times.

I'm assuming there is a way to prevent this and that's why im here. 

Is there a natural order to do things in or a way to move the sliders that makes it easier to create a beautiful non exaggerated face? What is your work order when creating a face using sliders?

Im pretty experienced in making faces in other games and often receive compliments for it. Facegen just makes me feel powerless. I often complain about it too. Im hoping I can learn how to use it effectively.

[FaceGen Guru]

Thank you for your feedback.

I haven't used the Oblivion editor so I'll comment with respect to our free version of FaceGen Modeller.

Your main issue about the sliders interacting is a known issue with the technology underlying FaceGen. I understand that it is frustrating to advanced users trying to create a close likeness using the sliders. We do want to fix this in the future by improving the underlying technology.

The plus side of our technology is that more casual users can quickly modify faces, either with the sliders or with the mouse (ctrl-click-drag) and still get realistic results.

I don't notice squinty pointy eyes in our software so I suspect that's a function of the base mesh being used.

As for the exaggerated face shapes, that's up to the implementation. FaceGen does have a caricature control which allows the amount of exaggeration from the average face to be enhanced (or decreased).

Best wishes,