Pillars of eternity portrait maker generator#

I could imagine many many ways to improve the algorithm so it wasn't making stupid choices.Our recognition of faces must be contextually based. Utilizing different backgrounds really tricks the eye into thinking the person is different when they are either very similar or exactly the same.Working with a small sample size (all heads use the same nose, and ear there are only a few different hair styles, then they vary by color) did result in a significant number of different looking portraits.But just doing it taught me a few things and gave me hope: These portraits are exactly as cheesy and bad as I feared. I didn't want to waste any art time until i understood the programming aspect better. Armed with some ingredients (heads, eyes, hair, etc.)В to play with, I set about making a simple portrait generator.

Pillars of eternity portrait maker generator#

Then I found an avatar generator art pack on. From RPG hand drawn ones, like those in Pillars of Eternity or Wasteland 2, to Baulders Gate, to stock photos of portraits where they take the picture of about 32 people all roughly the same way so you can see their face most distinctly. Second, I studied thousands of portraits. (More of this validated learning in future posts.) For instance, the placement of the eyes (how much forehead you have) how big they are, how close together or apart they are, all make us look quite different. I discovered scientific genetic analysis on what makes up the distinctiveness of the face. What we LearnedДЇirst, I've learned more about the human head than I ever wanted to. Either we figure out a way to dynamically generate GOOD portraits or we toss the portraits altogether.Дynamic portraits have sucked in the past, but why? What new approaches can we bring to the table to address or mitigate those problems? Is there a way to innovate to solve this differently.ДЇollowing the advice of Lean Startup to 'fail fast' (the point of a start up is Validated Learning not success), we decided to make a rough & dirty prototype at a GOOD portrait generator. Ugh! Necessity is the Mother of Invention

In hindsight, if the game is about you making relationships with any or every NPC and those relationships are supposed to matter, if you are supposed to feel real emotion when you see yourВ good friend Kate the Butcher, but if every female peasant is only different by name not face, it ruins the whole experience. Fine solution for the trailer, doesn't solve the game issue. So for the trailer IВ just forced the second innkeeper to use a different portrait. It actually ruined the whole dramatic thrust of the trailer/demo. (Answer - that's a different guy, but same picture). When we tried out a version of the gameplay trailer on a focus group, some people were confused: if you killed the innkeeper in one town, why does he pop up again in the next town.