How do people make decent looking faces?

[SRR8]

I can't for the life of me get a decent looking face using the GECK tools. Are there external tools that help with this?

[madmongo]

I am not aware of any external tools that can be used.

I personally often start with one of the existing faces that's somewhere in the right ballpark of what I want, then copy/paste that into my new NPC or player CG template and modify it from there.

Another method I use is to randomly generate the face, and keep hitting the Generate button on the face tab until it gives me something that I can use. In my experience, if the textures aren't good, fixing them with the Textures sliders in the Face Advanced tab is almost impossible. There have been many times when I have fiddled with those sliders for quite some time before giving up and generating new random faces and starting the whole process over again. I find it much easier to fix wonky geometry than to fix wonky textures.

It can be frustrating at times because moving one slider causes other sliders to move all on their own, so often you end up playing this iterative game of moving sliders around to get what you want then moving the other sliders around to fix the things that got screwed up, then back and forth and back and forth trying to force the features you want while undoing the changes that you don't want with other sliders.

I will also often save an NPC when the face is getting somewhat close to what I want. That way if I make changes and the facegen automatic sliders screw other things up too badly, I can just cancel that edit and reload the saved version of the NPC.

Good luck. I understand your frustration.

If the FO3/FNV facegen worked really well, they wouldn't have changed it all so drastically when they made Skyrim.

[Radioactivelad]

No external tools I'm aware of, but I have some general tips:

• When making a Male NPC, the first thing you should always do is go to the complexion slider and move it a little to the left. This "tightens" the default face up a bit, giving you a better starting canvas.
• When making a Female NPC, always hit the Reset Face button first. This gets rid of the "Bloated Blueberry" effect and again, starts you off with a better canvas. Also, *never* touch the complexion slider with Female NPCs. It's busted.
• Play around with the Brow-Nose-Chin and Forehead-Sellion-Nose ratio sliders. These help you get a good starting shape for the character your envisioning.
• Do not ignore the "Beard" and "Mustache" texture sliders, even, and especially for women. While they may seem excessive and unusable, they are actually very important for adjusting skin tone. A little in either direction goes a long way.
• COnsider using the "Old" races (not to be confused with the OldAged races) if you're trying to make a grizzly or tough looking character. The assets are just better for it.
• When you've got the Face Advanced tab open, you can directly manipulate the face by right clicking. Use this to make direct adjustments to specific areas. but be careful with it. (Also always save your mod before doing this, as it's not uncommon to crash while doing this.) You can CTRL-Z Undo any changes made this way by-the-by.

and finally:

• Understand that Fallout 3/NV characters have an.... Art Style. Realism isn't going to work; character designs with these assets benefit from a bit of caricature.

[JimboUK]

13 hours ago, Radioactivelad said:

 

• When you've got the Face Advanced tab open, you can directly manipulate the face by right clicking. Use this to make direct adjustments to specific areas. but be careful with it. (Also always save your mod before doing this, as it's not uncommon to crash while doing this.) You can CTRL-Z Undo any changes made this way by-the-by.

The crash happens if you touch a slider right after manipulating the face, this can be avoided by hitting OK to close the NPC's properties box and then opening it again.  

As for the GECK, it doesn't help that the character preview has some god awful fisheye effect going on that makes it hard to get an accurate picture of what the character will look like, this can be mitigated somewhat by dragging the corner of the preview window out and making it as large as possible, then use the mouse wheel the scroll the head back a bit.