Character creator for faces

[Omnificent Aspiration]

I am an artist but only good at faces when taking them from a photo and replicating them. Not making new ones. I am also a writer that wants to make some visuals to draw and have of my characters. I find little luck in finding apps for creating faces since apps that swap real faces or other real face photo tweaking stuff comes to the top on search results no matter what I type in. Another frustrating example of popular things overriding trying to do something creative or unconventional, even with insistance on otherwise.

So I am trying a game character creator as a face creator. The question becomes which one would be best for this. So I am posting this in several games with what I know or hear have character face creation in it. I need a decent variety of not only real and serious faces (not anime, cartoon, or goofy) but also hair styles. It's okay if some are weird and fringe as long as many are not.

I would like to know how you would compare this game to others for this type of character creation. Without mods first. Or tell me which games would be better. Mods come with issues I have for this so I want one that is first good without them.

Thanks for your time.

[Death Approaches]

it would probably be much easier to use something like DAZ 3D character creator, then export into .tri and dds texture files, or use an intermediary 3d format like say 3ds or blender if not straight to .nifs and anims straight to .hkx with havok tools, I don't know what's available today honestly... most don't create within the very limited framework the game inteface provides, just tweak via the sliders so they still look like the races they should look like; for new creations you should go external with whatever 3D character creation tool you're most familiar with and find a way to turn those assets into DX assets.

[Sairek Ceareste]

Most people refer to the vanilla faces of this game as "potatoes" so probably not very good. Especially so with the children. Their heads and faces don't... look quite right.

Still better than Oblivion, though.


There's been good faces that can be created with mods, but there's probably still some limitations to that given that this is still a 15 year old game at this point, especially with character creation.

The main problem is that there's no real face editing in Skyrim. There's just sliders that either choose things. Like, you can't select a nose as a template and then reshape it. If that's the nose you pick, that the nose you have. You might be able to move it's position a little and maybe alter the angle slightly with a couple of slides, but you're not going to be able to craft, shape or otherwise configure the nose into something unique.





As far as games with lots of options when it comes to faces, Black Desert Online is pretty sophisticated, though the game has a certain aesthetic to it that make the faces appear perhaps too beautiful to the point that they aren't grounded in any realism, if that makes sense.

It also has the limitation that the faces you get are locked depending on the class (the classes are less "classes" and more like "characters"), and those classes are gender locked.
There's (unsurprisingly for a Korean mmorpg), many more female options than male. The female roster is twice that of men. Some people had some success of making the females appear more male in their faces though. Either they've wished to play a tomboy or are just trying to surpass the gender locking altogether. Not much luck with making males appear to be female, though.


As mentioned, the options are extensive - you can form, shape, distort and morph the facial bone structure in various places along the face, ears, jaw, cheeks, forehead, etc, if you wish to dynamically.
I believe there's even an option to turn off symmetry too, so you can have a crooked nose, or one side sagging more than the other, etc. It even lets you upload other peoples' character faces into your game and use them if other people have saved a template, so others can download and import it into their game to either use that character's appearance settings, or allow you to modify it from there as a template.


If you want the game for the character creation only and don't feel like forking over $10, then private servers exist (which are hilariously more up to date than the Western version of the game), or the retail Korean version is also free to play without a $10 fee if you want a more official free approach and have some method to understand Korean.
Outside of private servers or the character creator though, I wouldn't recommend actually playing the game. It's grindy and designed to milk your wallet worse than a gacha game.

[Omnificent Aspiration]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

it would probably be much easier to use something like DAZ 3D character creator, then export into .tri and dds texture files, or use an intermediary 3d format like say 3ds or blender if not straight to .nifs and anims straight to .hkx with havok tools, I don't know what's available today honestly... most don't create within the very limited framework the game inteface provides, just tweak via the sliders so they still look like the races they should look like; for new creations you should go external with whatever 3D character creation tool you're most familiar with and find a way to turn those assets into DX assets.

I will look into that thanks.

[Omnificent Aspiration]

Originally posted by Sairek Ceareste:

Most people refer to the vanilla faces of this game as "potatoes" so probably not very good. Especially so with the children. Their heads and faces don't... look quite right.

Still better than Oblivion, though.


There's been good faces that can be created with mods, but there's probably still some limitations to that given that this is still a 15 year old game at this point, especially with character creation.

The main problem is that there's no real face editing in Skyrim. There's just sliders that either choose things. Like, you can't select a nose as a template and then reshape it. If that's the nose you pick, that the nose you have. You might be able to move it's position a little and maybe alter the angle slightly with a couple of slides, but you're not going to be able to craft, shape or otherwise configure the nose into something unique.





As far as games with lots of options when it comes to faces, Black Desert Online is pretty sophisticated, though the game has a certain aesthetic to it that make the faces appear perhaps too beautiful to the point that they aren't grounded in any realism, if that makes sense.

It also has the limitation that the faces you get are locked depending on the class (the classes are less "classes" and more like "characters"), and those classes are gender locked.
There's (unsurprisingly for a Korean mmorpg), many more female options than male. The female roster is twice that of men. Some people had some success of making the females appear more male in their faces though. Either they've wished to play a tomboy or are just trying to surpass the gender locking altogether. Not much luck with making males appear to be female, though.


As mentioned, the options are extensive - you can form, shape, distort and morph the facial bone structure in various places along the face, ears, jaw, cheeks, forehead, etc, if you wish to dynamically.
I believe there's even an option to turn off symmetry too, so you can have a crooked nose, or one side sagging more than the other, etc. It even lets you upload other peoples' character faces into your game and use them if other people have saved a template, so others can download and import it into their game to either use that character's appearance settings, or allow you to modify it from there as a template.


If you want the game for the character creation only and don't feel like forking over $10, then private servers exist (which are hilariously more up to date than the Western version of the game), or the retail Korean version is also free to play without a $10 fee if you want a more official free approach and have some method to understand Korean.
Outside of private servers or the character creator though, I wouldn't recommend actually playing the game. It's grindy and designed to milk your wallet worse than a gacha game.

I see. For reasons that may sound irrelevant and be boring to read I prefer non online games that: (for one of the reasons) there is no risk of ever going down when servers do. Knowing that in even 10 years my dozens of characters made in it will still be accessible because it will be accessible from an installer any time in the future and without internet connection.

[Omnificent Aspiration]

Thanks for all input everyone. I think between input here and other discussions on other games I have enough for an informed decision. I'm turning off notifications for this to me. It doesn't matter if people want to keep discussing among each other about it.