They look terrible if you don’t use them properly, but within the parameters are the same faces that are made by professional character artists. It would make more sense to me to have this face as the default, but allow players to make their own if they don’t like it.
Surely most of the npcs in the game will have randomly generated faces, so I don’t see why the player character should be a special case, having a particular face.
i have yet to see a procedural face generator in a game that doesn’t look bad and unnatural. maybe you can provide some examples. i know eve has something that is “good”, but i’m not impressed. complete procedural just looks awful, sorry. if they can make scanned faces and have limited procedural features for it(move eye area/nose/mouth down/forward/back few centimeters, etc, it could still look natural.
Why a sad face over a set face? 
So you think every npc in this game will be carefully constructed with tools that couldn’t possibly be made available to players? Interesting theory.
they’re using face scanning. might want to read the faqs and watch the videos before using the forum. it seems you’re missing a lot of information that’s giving you hideously erroneous views about the game.
From video update #2:
with face scanning, you’re getting a digital replica of a real person’s head. nothing gets more realistic than that. then the artist optimizes it, removes glitches, refines details like pores, wrinkles. when all things are ready, they retopologize it for a lower resolution game-ready mesh and bake the sub maps(ambient occlusion, normal, displacement, etc) from the high polygon model.
this is advantages because the process is faster than creating a head of the same quality and realism from scratch. you get more heads, from which adjustments can be made to both texture and sub maps, and to the model itself, creating many permutations in less time. very important for open world with many npcs.
complete procedural technology lacks both the pure representation of face scanning, and lacks the artist’s detail and touches. it simply cannot approach any level of life-like appearance, and ultimately can only generate barby doll like faces with some organic features, but overall, not very human looking by comparison to what artists can do, or better yet what artists can do with aid of face scanning.
Since everyone is saying that this is a waste of time and resources I would say that they could make the character editor into a DLC, in that way it would not delay the game development (But it would delay the second and third act. Which might be an affordable price to pay. But this also means more money for Act 2 & 3. Even though the amount of players who wants to customize their character seems limited.) In the end Warhorse studios needs to make a hard calculation on the profitability of this, but they might ignore it because they plan to make the game of their dreams here and if that dream includes a custom character model designer then they can go ahead.
That’s just how I see it. Also I’ve been noticing that some people complaints when non-pledges gives ideas to the game, so FYI I’m a Baron I just haven’t received the badge code yet.
Kind regards,
Chralex.
i think ElFriend is right. if they get that modding tool out there then it wont matter if they dont make the face up to the player in the main game.
Also I would love to see some way of character creation, I understand the points raised against it. Anyway, having a unique character is only quite important in MMOs imho.
it’s like the entire discussion didn’t happen. character creation sucks. that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you.
I watched the video you’re talking about (it shows off my favourite system from the game).
I’m going to assume that for the head models, they’re using 3d meshes like every other 3d game and fixing them to a skeleton so they can be animated. In order to use the same animation for many different character models, it is neccessary to use a skeleton that will fit to every character. This process is the same, regardless of whether the shortcut of scanning a real head was used to generate the base model.
Once you have the model and the skeleton, it is simple to “hand polish” the model, partly by drawing the texture from the phototexture that you’ve generated and partly by adjusting parameters so that you can have many heads from each head scan.
If every head will use a completely different scanned model, that’s great and everything makes sense, but it’s possible you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.
I would LOVE an indepth head customization system ala The elder scrolls series… I know its not needed, but It makes it feel more personal somehow 
Yeah, wander the woods as Abbath Doom Occulta. 
Im totally gonna make a corpse paint texture mod when I get the chance haha 
Edit: Sorry I mean “demon war paint” XD
If I remember well they want to use 3D scanner to generate faces. So besides hair and facial hair there’s not much room for this I guess. But hope someone from WH will tell us details about how it will be with all faces in game.
And you can most likely expect mods for this.
If they allowed customization that would make sense, IE only white skin color, I can already see the controversy cooked up over at Kotaku or somewhere about it
I am fine with set protagonist, as long as he is well modelled, animated and voice acted. Like that white haired bad ass Geralt 
