When I first discovered iClone in version one it had a powerful image to 3D face tool that was unmatched in the industry as far as I could find. What impressed me was using a photo of the long-running James Bond actor Roger Moore. The character mesh looked nothing like Moore. Having already been disappointed by the early photo-to-face tool in Poser, which did everything but look like the reference photo, I wasn’t expecting much.

The default mesh had a thin face and head along with an equally thin body that did anything but match Roger Moore’s appearance at the time. After a short wait, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It WAS Roger Moore in the face and head despite the body being thin.

After this, I rounded up several more pictures of former Bond actors like Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan. All were very good copies of the original actor as the tool seemed to shape the head according to the image. Maybe it was just my imagination but that thin mesh head suddenly filled out with different images and became the basis of a test clip called “The Faces of Bond” which helped to sell me on iClone as a viable tool.

Even being new to iClone I was able to put the clip together in one day. Something unheard of at the time, particularly when animation could cost thousands of dollars per minute to produce. My project cost was the cost of iClone and my time.

Today Reallusion’s photograph to 3D face tool is known as Headshot and resides in iClone’s close cousin, Character Creator and it is easy to use with a minimal learning curve like other Reallusion products. Whether it be a photograph or an AI-generated image, Headshot can use that image to make a very close copy with minimal work.

As of yet, I haven’t found an easier-to-use photograph to 3D face product that turns out such stunning characters with so little time and effort.

AI-Enhanced Headshot 2 Plugin

Headshot, like Character Creator, was a major boost in creativity and productivity when it was released. This is particularly true for those of us who might be lacking in a skill or two when it comes to creating characters with unique faces or reproducing well-known faces of celebrities or newsmakers. Character Creator is loaded with tools including integration with ZBrush for quick and easy round trips between the apps. However, not all of us are master sculptors of facial features but this photograph to 3D face tool makes us look like pros.

Headshot gives digital artists or character devs a quality photo-to-face tool that can bring more detail to your characters. Headshot gives us the ability to take an image (photo or ai-generated) and create a high-quality character with great facial features and expressions. It can be done with little to no intervention in the Auto mode or more detailed shaping and guidance with the Pro mode. Both modes are included in the plugin. 

If you are new to creating 3D characters, you’ll soon learn there is no easy way to do so without applications like Character Creator. Not only does creating a character involve making the basic character mesh, but there is also UV mapping, rigging, and skinning down to knuckles and toes. You have to learn about binding and poly collapse along with poly count and many other 3D nuances.

Or… you can use Character Creator and the Headshot plugin.

Why Use Character Creator and Headshot?

To save time and frustration while getting great results. Being able to tweak those results right up to rendering time is another bonus. Character Creator and Headshot handles all of the character creation tasks for us while we concentrate on making the best character we can.

It wasn’t that long ago that a 3D artist had to have several applications like Maya, 3DS Max, or Cinema 4D for the majority of the work. A painting program like 3D Coat for UV texturing. Sculpting programs like ZBrush or Mudbox for more organic shapes and the list was long. None of those tools are cheap and back in the early days they were prohibitively expensive for the average freelancer while shutting out the home animator completely.

Character Creator and Headshot’s pricing make the tool more readily available to a wider group of animators and character devs for fast turnaround which saves time and money. Smaller studios can benefit from getting more of out their existing talent pool without increasing anyone’s workload. It may decrease the workload while improving character output.

With Character Creator and the Headshot plugin, we can dump the expensive apps and the long, difficult learning curves to concentrate on creativity instead of the tedious technical work required to create a great character with full function and a massive expression library.  

Character Creator characters also work in pipelines for Unreal Engine and Nvidia Omniverse with plugins and USD file support. You can control the action from iClone while using the game and render engines for a more cinematic look and feel.

Auto Mode

Auto mode excels at making groups of unique characters in a ridiculously easy way. In this tutorial, I wasn’t looking to exactly duplicate the head in the image, which is possible, but I was more interested in quickly turning out unique characters. This was a quantity-over-quality endeavor (1024×1024 texture resolution) looking to turn out as many characters as possible, so I did not do any reshaping to tweak the head to match the image.

Pro Mode

Don’t let the title fool you. While it is Pro mode, you don’t have to be a pro to use it. In fact, it gives us more tools like the image matching tool and sculpting tools to get results of 4 times higher resolution (4096×4096) compared to Auto Mode. When used in combination with each other, Headshot can create even more professional and delicate close-up views of virtual humans without tweaking any sliders or other morphs.

However, if we use the morph sliders to help shape the head we can more closely match our source image with overall head shaping and individual feature shaping.

The second part of the tutorial below shows how easy it is to use the pro mode with the sculpting features to more closely match the source image. I’ve purposely kept the tutorials short as we can always go to Kai’s tutorials for more details.

TIP: If necessary, you can run your character through both modes using the Auto mode for hair generation and the Pro mode with the Image Matching tool for more detailed sculpting. Go through the Auto mode first then save the hair it generates before going on to the Pro mode for more shaping after which you can load the generated hair onto the character as the hair will conform to the head shapes.

Common Features for Both Modes

Facial Ethnicity Detection

As you can see, behind the scenes, Character Creator does a lot of work that we don’t have to even think about. As I stated earlier it was the powerful “image to head” technology that brought users like me to iClone back in version one long before AI and since then, with AI, Reallusion has improved on that tech.

Match Skin and Body Types for Generated Heads

Character Creator gives us several body types to choose from whether it be for “Image to Face” or Mesh. These body types range from a currently loaded character to male, female, baby, and neutral. It also gives us some initial tools on skin type like Clean Soft, Clean Rough, Scalp, Beard and Scalp. These help to tell Character Creator how to handle the final output and deserve some time spent here with experimentation. It is recommended that you try all of these types at least once to get an idea of what they can do.

Hair Generation

One of the unique features of Auto mode is Hair generation. Character Creator takes care of this process with no intervention on our part as it relies on the original image for input. According to the website it also adds an additional mesh layer with an alpha mask to soften the edges. The generated 3D hair is also conformable to other character head shapes.

Build a 3D Hair Library

Auto Mode Hair generation can help you build a library of Character Creator hair. Start a habit of saving generated hair and before long you will have a library of hairstyles for your characters. Since the process is handled by the software we just have to wait for the magic to happen, save the hair, and watch our library grow.

One thing we find out, as animators and digital artists, is the fact that you can never have too many hair assets in your inventory. Not only does Auto Mode do all the work but you get the hair as a bonus.

Headshot Morphs 1000+ Detailed Shape Refinement

Another feature that makes Headshot so powerful is the Headshot Morph 1000+. From full head and face sculpting to individual features – head contour, face, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, the six levels of morph detail enable users to hover over different control areas, and use directional mouse drags to refine the corresponding mesh shape intuitively. You can quickly achieve the professional and detailed look of 3D scan models.

Even more, the search function in Headshot Morph 1000+ helps to locate the targeted morph out of 1,125 facial morphs categorized by unique visual icons and naming within a second, users are given control over all possible facial shapes for the most accurate source images to recreate all possible human facial varieties regardless of race.

Source Photograph or Image Prep

There are some things to keep in mind when searching for or creating source images. Foremost is a good image with soft, diffused lighting. We don’t want any harsh shadows on any area of the face as it may come out as a dark spot on the character’s face. A main offender is a side shadow which makes one side of the face too dark and one side of the face light resulting in a less than desired result that looks more like a dirty face.

From the Source Photo Guide in the Headshot Manual:

• A good image/photo is the key to great result of Headshot 3D head generating process. There are five crucial factors to kind in mind when it comes to choosing a good image or taking a good photo.
• The image used for realistic 3D head generation should be a clear, well lit picture of a full head facing front, with nothing obscuring the facial features. The film format of the image can be .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif or .tiff.
• Depending on the mode you use for generating the head, the concept of an ideal image are basically the same yet differ in terms of resolution and cropping.

Mesh Head Option (New in Headshot 2.0 Update)

There is also a mesh option with Headshot 2 that allows us to replace the head of a character with a different head mesh such as creating an anthropomorphic cat or dog with human, bipedal characteristics with a working animal mesh head. While this article focuses on the Photo to Face options I also wanted to point out the mesh feature for those that may not be aware of it. This powerful, but simple method involves mapping points on the mesh head to match up with Character Creator’s mesh and controls. You can have as few as 24 points or more if needed to define areas like the back of the head or odd shaped ears. There is also an auto-map feature that, in my experience, matches anywhere from 80 to 100 percent of the points needed leaving only minor adjustments and maybe a few additional points.

As usual, Character Creator does the hard work for us. You can get more information from my review on the Mesh option when it was released providing an overview of the process.

Summary

It doesn’t matter what size operation you have, from a one-person studio to a major motion picture studio, Headshot can save a lot of time which saves a lot of money that can be budgeted elsewhere or possibly even go into that ever-elusive concept called “Profit” to make your life better.

Using AI-generated images, stock photography, or our images, Character Creator and Headshot provides us with a consistent and feasible method of creating highly detailed characters for close-ups, crowds or actor groups. We don’t need a supercharged set of skills to produce a great character. Just a good source image, Character Creator, and the Headshot 2 plugin.

Click here for an overview of the 7 steps to create an AI-generated character.