Playing with Oblivion

I've been playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the past couple weeks. I didn't even finish the NWN2 main quest because killing the main boss is extremely difficult.

Anyway, one of the features of Oblivion (and the latest, greatest hit game Mass Effect) is that they use the FaceGen Modeler system to create and render character faces (both PC and NPC). So you can literally have any character look that you want.

Unfortunately, getting good-looking character faces using Oblivion's in-game face editor is a tedious, hit-and-miss affair. What other players have done is spend hours producing faces, then exchanging these faces with each other on forums. However, the FaceGen Modeller 3.2 Demo allows any user to import a face into the FaceGen system. All you need is a front-facing photo, and a left-facing photo. So a mug shot would do.

For myself, I decided to try using Jessica Biel. Here are the photos which I used (found them using Google Image Search). They have to be of reasonable resolution (e.g. 400 pixels wide at least) for the system to work well.



Use the "PhotoFit" tab of FaceGen Modeller to bring in the two images, and apply the crosshairs to the control points in the image.







Once FaceGen Modeller has done its grinding away (3-5 minutes, depending on your hardware), we can verify how good a job it's done. In this case, a very good job (I mean, the rendered image is recognizable as Ms Biel):



Afterwards, save the generated face as an FG file. Then, using Zennorious' FaceGen to Oblivion Converter, apply the FaceGen file to an existing Oblivion save game. It's also useful to have Oblivion Face Exchange Lite so you can edit the hair style, transfer faces from one save game to another, and so forth.

Here's Jessica Biel as an Altmer. Unfortunately, something got lost in the translation from FaceGen to Oblivion, but the result is still OK.