In the future, will the character customizer be able to scan an imported photo of our own face to generate it in the customizer? This would be helpful and quicker than creating our own face from scratch.

I would say the first thing that I think of when I hear that is, first of all, awesome. Second of all, it's solving the issues of what a camera could create. So, for example, when we do our skin textures and stuff like that, there's a lot of requirements, especially again with physically based rendering; we can't have shadows in the diffuse map, right? We have to extrapolate the normal information or height information, essentially spec cavity, specular occlusion, stuff like that. So the real question is, let's say the camera can take a picture of your face to eventually bring in as a texture, not going into any additional data that could potentially actually shape a head or something. But assuming we're just talking about textures, I think that those would be the biggest issues to solve: how do we clean up that data in order to get it game ready by processing the textures, which currently our artists do, and Claire Engle has done for us. So that's just the first thing that pops in my head when I hear that.

Okay, so I think there are some ways we could go about this. I think once we have all the 60 heads from our gene pool extension, once they're in and we have their textures, together with the skin tone tinting that we can already do, I think we have enough variety in terms of the textures, I would hope so. In terms of the shapes, it's going to be a problem of finding a way to recognize the features. There are already some SDKs out there that we could use; face detection itself does that to a degree. It shows you where the eyes are, where the mouth contours are. So you could leverage that to a degree, recognize those features, and then try to find samples in our gene pool that can approximate this. So we have a vague idea, or a pretty good idea, of what needs doing. It would be super cool for the players to use that. Even for NPC creation, you just show a photo, and the software would create that face or approximate it reasonably closely. But again, priorities. It's not very high up on the list, I guess.

I keep thinking about it now. And then even on a simpler turn, just with the skin tone itself, if you knew what the offset is, because what we do with the skin tones now is we calibrate them, we balance them to make sure they're accurate to the real-life talent. So if you did have mid-gray or whatever in the shot with you when your image got taken, or some kind of Macbeth chart, obviously that would increase the... whatever. But theoretically, if you did have some kind of mid-gray or something, we would know some offsets on what would actually be happening in your environment to bring you back to a neutral skin tone color that could then be applied using our current palette, at least matching the closest possible. So I don't know. It's interesting. It's a fun one to think about for sure.

Yeah, Andreas mentioned the thing I was thinking about: using Faceware, not for the textures, but to determine the location, the spacing of certain things, and just to give you a base shape of the face that would be somewhat closer to you that you could start with. There seemed like there's potential there to me.

It's a good idea. It's a great idea. I mean, you've got to start somewhere. You've got to start trying things.

I mean, one thing we already do is with face sculpting, we take a position of a point and we use that to decide what heads to blend between. So once you've got the positions of those points, through however we want to detect it through the camera, then it's actually solving the same problem.