Creating Pretty Female Characters

[Blacksnake89]

Don't flame me, I personally don't like the Mystic Elves anymore. :biggrin:

 

That's because my love lies in Lineage II Dark Elves.

 

Anyway, nice faces can be most easily obtained on the default of custom races. They'll far surpass stock races and if you don't mess with them much, you won't have to worry about making them ugly. >.>

 

You can scour save games, but I find a lot of those to be odd-looking.

 

If you can find some Japanese mod sites, they tend to have incredible faces in their save games! I knew an awesome one, but it's down. T_T

 

Find a custom race mod you really love the looks of. Edit the default faces minorly. On custom races resetting the face right-off can help because it diminishes such unattractive features.

 

Some things I personally think one should avoid doing to their character that can make them unattractive:

 

- Large, overly-pursed lips (looks too doll-like)

- Massive eyes (too unnatural and anime-like)

- Very wide jawlines (a female character can end up looking too masculine, likewise odd if her jawline is too narrow)

- Sunken cheeks (messing around too much with the settings for cheeks can make your character look unhealthy)

- Overly-rounded faces (simply make a character look too plump in comparison to their body)

- Too much eye makeup (a lot messing with those eye tone sliders seems to mess with the rest of the face's tones and makes a character look creepy!)

- Ghostly white skin (fair skin is beautiful, but when your character is outright glowing in the sunlight, well aside from eye damage, its just odd ... tone lighten the skin far too much, keep the light/dark slider about halfway and use adjust the ratio of blue and gold tones in the skin instead)

 

Those are some majors for me. These days I like my light-skinned characters to be fair with healthy golden hues to their skin and my Dark Elves to be more blue than green looking, and I don't actually add eyeliner or eyeshadow to them much at all, and it seems to help!

 

I hope those tips can help you out.

I myself am pretty good at messing with the stock face generator. I have made some wonderful looking Imperials and Bretons both male and female. I'd upload some pics but I don't have the means to yet. As for my technique I'd love to share it with you but I honestly don't know how to descibe what I do short of I spend a good 2-3 hours tinkering with the sliders untill I get what I like. I would also suggest downloading modded races, I would suggest mystic elf, Linneage elf, or look for NEC's mystic elf remakes my favorite are the mystic high elves. You could also ask NEC or Divine Avenger both are excellent face modelers.

[Cynster]

Don't flame me, I personally don't like the Mystic Elves anymore. :biggrin:

 

That's because my love lies in Lineage II Dark Elves.

 

Anyway, nice faces can be most easily obtained on the default of custom races. They'll far surpass stock races and if you don't mess with them much, you won't have to worry about making them ugly. >.>

 

You can scour save games, but I find a lot of those to be odd-looking.

 

If you can find some Japanese mod sites, they tend to have incredible faces in their save games! I knew an awesome one, but it's down. T_T

 

Find a custom race mod you really love the looks of. Edit the default faces minorly. On custom races resetting the face right-off can help because it diminishes such unattractive features.

 

Some things I personally think one should avoid doing to their character that can make them unattractive:

 

- Large, overly-pursed lips (looks too doll-like)

- Massive eyes (too unnatural and anime-like)

- Very wide jawlines (a female character can end up looking too masculine, likewise odd if her jawline is too narrow)

- Sunken cheeks (messing around too much with the settings for cheeks can make your character look unhealthy)

- Overly-rounded faces (simply make a character look too plump in comparison to their body)

- Too much eye makeup (a lot messing with those eye tone sliders seems to mess with the rest of the face's tones and makes a character look creepy!)

- Ghostly white skin (fair skin is beautiful, but when your character is outright glowing in the sunlight, well aside from eye damage, its just odd ... tone lighten the skin far too much, keep the light/dark slider about halfway and use adjust the ratio of blue and gold tones in the skin instead)

 

Those are some majors for me. These days I like my light-skinned characters to be fair with healthy golden hues to their skin and my Dark Elves to be more blue than green looking, and I don't actually add eyeliner or eyeshadow to them much at all, and it seems to help!

 

I hope those tips can help you out.

I agree with all of that completely. I really prefer the more natural look you can get with the normal races, I haven't had much luck with the custom races (not a fan of the mystic elves either).

[Cynster]

Sorry for the double post, but you can get that face using the cute elves mod, setting complexion to the left, then changing the skin tone :3 Everything else you should be able to keep the same ^^

[tungol]

Lots of good advice here. I would point you to the CS Wiki, too. There's some good advice there.

And DO download facegen, if just for fun. I spent a whole Saturday just finding pics of celebrities and gen'ing their 3D faces (never used any of them, but GREAT fun--don't export textures, though). You can do your own face that way, too, which is lots of fun, and you get better results because you can take proper mugshots of yourself.

 

You HAVE to have different face textures, especially for dark-skinned characters. I've been killing myself trying to work that out. Darkening the complexion adds that wierd feathering above the eyebrows, and a general blotchiness. I don't know enough about how it works to fix that, so I make dark custom textures that don't have to be darkened. I think I've figured out that you need a smooth, low-contrast normal map for that too. In fact, I use the same smooth, low-contrast N-map for all my face textures.

 

As for the shape, I've found I can usually make a good-looking face in about 20 minutes, starting with the standard imperial settings. Bear in mind that some changes affect others. Cheek height and eye size is the most noticeable. Here's a few tricks I've learned (for females, anyway. You can do anything with a male face. But in general, moderation produces the best results):

low (or high?) slope under the jaw, but not all the way (say 80%).

slightly concave jawline

jaw can be narrow or wide, depending on your other settings (and your tastes)

65-80% narrow chin

check the underbite

50% on most mouth settings

try slightly wide nostrils with slightly small nostrils.

Extreme settings with the nose will look awful, and you won't know why. The only exceptions are the sellion settings and concavity.

convex nose region looks elfin/childlike. concave can be nice too, though. (extremes here help determine the TYPE of face you're making)

a lower sellion makes the eyes look more exotic. Likewise if you lower the inner brow and raise the outer brow (and then lower the whole brow because you probably went overboard.)

try widening the sellion slightly.

shorten the mouth-chin distance (after you're happy with the nose)

if you like large eyes, leave the cheekbones lower

forehead size and height will only tolerate very minor changes without looking like a supervillain.

forehead slope can be very nice at any extreme IMO. But extremes seem to conflict with some custom hairs.

 

texture settings MUST be changed in small increments! And setting darken/lighten to either extreme will ruin you texture irreparable (I don't know why, but any extreme seems to have a general screwing-up effect).

make very slight changes to the eyebrow settings to drastically change your character's look or fix problems with the eyebrows or eyes. Try things that don't seem like they'd help--you can be surprised.

try eye sliders other than just eyeliner and eyeshadow. Bruising can get you a more subtle effect.

slightly lighten the beard.

slightly darken the mustache if your upper lip is too pale. (I don't touch the pale lip slider much, to avoid that)

start with a standard hair color, and then adjust 2-3 of the sliders together.

 

In general, I think the best way is to make a few minor changes to everything first (but finish the shape before you do texture) then go back and make a few more minor changes. If it's not working out like you want, go back and reverse a few things.

Well...I really hadn't meant to write a book...

[darkcloud372]

I was scrolling through many of the beauty mods for the game, and I was just wondering what does it take to create such pretty faces? The default Imperial is so ugly and fat, and lets not get started with the randomize feature. It seems like for every pretty face out there, theres 700 other ways to get it wrong. I'm sure it takes an an artist and a keen eye to make an attractive character, even with the right mods.

 

But I was wondering if I could get some pointers on creating a pretty face.My first girl turned out pretty average on my first attempt at the game. I thought I created the perfect face with the capabilities of the face constructor, untill I saw other examples.

 

So anyway, I'm looking for some tips in creating some real beauties that I wouldn't mind looking at for 40+ straight hours in the tab menu. I'm looking for tips on creating an overall pretty character.

 

I attached an example. I like her eyes and lips, how would I go about reproducing those results? What mod files would I need?

 

http://img65.imageshack.us/img65/6327/1212882288028oblivionoi9.jpg

 

 

Sorry man, but i think she looks stoned. I have no advice for this other than: Slow down on the boobage!

[billypnats]

eye of the beholder, but my PC char took me not once but several times, I make the best I could at the end of the sewer tunnel, I play for a bit and go hey! Her jawbones are too manly or ZOMG SHE HAS A CLEFT CHIN! and then i edit it

[Leenysaurus]

I have a fairly fool-proof way to make a pretty stock race.

 

Re-path the default races to one of Ren's head meshes.

 

It works absolute wonders. I *highly* recommend this simple trick!