Personable Heads

As the conclusion for the Talking Heads project, I said that all I needed was some project in which to use them. Then a friend reminded me of an old project, and finally, I realised, I do have a place for them. And working on them in this new context, I finally decided to add what was needed to take the basic randomised facial features of the previous post to create really memorable faces. Just take a look at this!

There might be a couple of bugs I need to iron out when it comes to the hair-spikes, as I call them.

Let's talk about the changes I have made:

• Skin colours have a chance to be pale, and there is also a slight difference in hue.
• Hair has a chance to become dyed, that is, merged with a random colour to a random degree
• I added glasses, which are two circles with a bridge inbetween. Quite a lot of time was spent making them sit in front of the eyes, neither too near or too far, and follow individual differences in width between the eyes. Much less time was spent randomizing them - random colours and random... triangularity? Pointing either up or down.
• Spots! People have spots, or beauty marks or pimples or what you want to call them.
• Hair spikes are essential in removing the creepy flat surface that hair sported earlier. No longer does everyone have bowl cuts! With how I generate the triangles, I do not even need a controlling variable like spikiness or direction, the random distribution creates unique enough results in itself.
  The hair spikes took me and will take me forever to get right. I don't think they should be as difficult as they are to me, I just really am a doofus when it comes to 3D geometry. The current solution only works as long as they are looking generally towards the screen, since the triangles are flat.
  You can imagine the procedure. Find points within the hair, choose a direction and draw a triangle. It's a bit more complicated than that, since neither distribution nor direction can be chosen completely randomly, but that's the general gist.
• Age! Specifically wrinkles. The people at the top of the image are very young and have no wrinkles, while further down there, they look old, or at least, tired. The wrinkles are not really randomly generated, just hand-drawn. It was faster. Every person has different strengths of each of the possible wrinkle-types. Generally each person sports 1-3 of the possible 7 wrinkle types.
• Gender. Fuck.

So, the original idea was to keep the generator gender-free. The game that I inserted the faces into already had gender programmed in, though. Gender, of course, is almost entirely cosmetic. And the general facial structure, as well, is gender neutral. Only the following features depend on gender, and most often, not in all cases.

Eye-lashes were a really nice addition to the program. Anchored at a random point between the triangle tip and the circle of the eye, simple triangles are drawn to add a very charming flourish. They are, of course, mirrored on the other side - this took me quite a while, though, because in the first version, the eyelashes on the other side were, er, flipped upside down. Still, great fun is to be had with it working. And though it is a gender marker, men, too can have eyelashes. Pretty often, even, but they have 0-2 eyelashes while women have 1-5.

Lipstick! That's what I'll choose to call it. Women (especially) have a chance to have their simple thin-line mouths replaced with a random, most often red, colour, shaped like the well known lips from cartoons. Everything is inspired by cartoons, of course. You might also notice a neat little gradient across the lips, a good alternative to actually modelling two lips. But not all women have lipstick, mind you!

Baldness was a really simple addition to men. It can happen to women too, but it is much more rare. It really is as simple as just removing the hair, though in a later version, I might add options to have stubble up there.

Beards are the other masculine feature, and really, I wanted women to have it too sometimes, like, very faint-but-still-noticeable mustaches. But nooooo. That does not work. Nothing signals maleness quite like a beard. So as compromise, not all men have beards.

Beards are comprised of three parts: The 'stache, the 'tee and the 'burns, each drawn onto different parts of the face. Our man up above only has 'stache and 'tee. Special feature - if both 'stache and 'tee are enabled, there'll be some nice handlebars to connect them.

The chances for each part of the beard are related but independent. If a character has one part, they most often have all. The 'stache has the highest probability of appearing, though. Oh, each part also has a transparency, showing how thick or stubbly the beard is.

 

Shapes. Currently, there is not that big of a difference in shapes, apart from what the facial geometry itself offers. The 'tee has a random arrow-height, that is, a chance for a soul-patch to appear, or it can be more flat.

However, 'staches have a magical property: They follow along with the lips! If the character smiles, so does the 'stache, and opposite too, as can be seen with our purple friend above.

And that is about that. I do not think I am quite done, yet. I still have plans to rework the facial geometry, since it, er, is a bit inflexible and odd at the moment. But until then, I am quite happy with the current amount of diversity.

The game. Maybe I'll show it off at some point. It is not that randomized, by which I mean, literally everything is randomized, but gameplay-wise, not in regards to graphics nor the game design itself. The faces really have added a lot to it. Now it is a tycoon game, where you lead an animation studio producing cartoons, by managing cartoon characters themselves.

Maybe I'll show it off at some point. It is so close to being really good.