Ms Littlefish's Faceset Edits and Faceset Tutorials

[Ms Littlefish]

I thought in the aftermath of the "Super Awesome Face" contest that I would show how I use the generator parts to great potential.

Part 1: Setting up the face parts for a neutral face

If you want to follow along here is some useful information.

Directory:  C: >Program Files (x86)>Steam>SteamApps>common>RPGMakerVXAce>Generator>Face

Face parts: Female 

• Face 4
• Rear Hair 11
• Front Hair 11
• Eyes 4
• Nose 8
• Mouth 6
• Eyebrows 3
• Ears 1
• Neck 1a

For easy access I will put the rest of the parts in this post. I'll work on the formatting later.

Spoiler

Part 2: Shadows, Colors, and Accessorizing 

SPOOPY WARNING: I forgot to mention this. Only change the size of your .PNG file to 96x96. You want your .PSD to remain 128x128 pixels so you use it as a base to make your emotion sets and other edits. I totally messed that up!

 

[Ruby]

Great tutorial!! 

 

[Goldstorm]

It's also worth noting that you can download Adobe Photoshop CS2 at no cost from Adobe's website. The reason behind this is as of December 15th 2013, the activation servers for CS2 were shutdown. You just need a valid adobe id.

Step one is to visit this link.

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html#

Sign in or create a new ID. Then download. Take note of the serial numbers next to the install links.

If you have any questions, there is a thread about this being discussed on Adobe's website, or go ahead and ask me.

https://forums.adobe.com/message/4919014#4919014#4919014?sdid=KCHDS

edit: All the tools used in the video above are very basic and in CS2.

 

[Oddball]

lol. I clicked on the music thing thinking it was the tutorial

 

[cabfe]

That's a nice tutorial which might convince some people that image editing is not that difficult as it seems and can help us adding our own little touch to our games.

Thank you!

 

[Vexed]

This is really cool - I'll admit in the past I've mostly ignored the face generator thinking it was unable to produce much of worth but the individual pieces are actually really great. All it takes is a little care and time to make the most of them. Really useful tutorial full of a lot of neat tips and tricks I, personally would have never thought of.

I had a quick play around after dinner and in about 25 mins came up with this.

Random Face -

I swapped around a couple of parts to make it look a -little- less freaky that it did originally. The mouth and nose, specifically.

After following the Tutorial -

I went for the more tan skin-tone cause I thought it looked better against the hair. So, she went from slightly strange looking green haired girl to smouldering, smexy dryad lookin' chick with a bad-ass scar! I'm very pleased~

Btw. Anyone who wants to use this lady for whatever reason, go right ahead! [As long as you own VX-Ace, obviously.]

 

[Ms Littlefish]

That face is great, Vexed! 

Now that I think about it I have a lot of other points I could have mentioned in this video that I commonly do when editing faces. I know I can in future installments and I am pretty dead set on doing more parts for this tutorial.

Other editions I want to add to this tutorial include

• Changing the scale on noses and mouths are highly recommended for a few of the parts. Some are freakishly huge and disproportionate right out of the box but are easily fixed with this process.
• I will touch on topics such as creating makeup
• Making shadows and extra dimension
• How to use other parts of the transform tool with each face part
• Suggestions on how to make a much more expressive emotion set
• Palette/color swapping face set parts

The raw parts of the generator are really usable which is why I suggest getting the add on parts that our talented folk have made. More to play with!

To provide more example. Here is a character emotion set I did that uses only very basic Photoshop application. Many ridiculously sized parts are resized, re positioned, rotated, flipped, ect. Some things are recolored. Other things are layered up. Hell, I even made her 'leaf dress' out of the green bandanna accessories using the distort and warp options in the transform tool.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Part 2: Shadows, Colors, and Accessorizing 




Before/After Part 2

Note: If you're not doing this on camera you will get those headbands used as the clothing to not look so terrible. But if you're me, you did this really fast on camera and sucked at it, and then edited off camera to not suck. No worries, same tools were used. Just play! 

 

[Caitlin]

I decided to take a shot at this, despite not really being able to create unique looking faces and only watching part of the video as my internet sucks.  I hope this is good.  It's suppose to be a young girl in high school or maybe middle school.  I left it more like anime style of eyes rather than realistic, but I really love how it came out. Note - I am disappointed in the fact that there is no character set to go with it as it turned out really well.  Oddly enough, since I've avoided generator faces as they have the feeling of looking the same.

 

[cabfe]

After the freak show contest, are we going to see a beauty contest for balance?

 

[Ms Littlefish]

It's looking really good, Caitlin! I'm so happy to see other people trying this out. I swear once you get the hang of it, options really do open up and you can create a multitude of different looks. I'm not much of a sprite maker, but with Photoshop I am usually able to Frakensprite something that matches my face edits.

Also, in case my part two did not really showcase it, headbands/bandannas are OP.

This is one of my characters, Raina. 

 

[Oddball]

Ha-Ha-Ha! you said that you have to eyeball it when you were talking about where to put the eyes on the face (i just watched this now)

occasinaly, you can get a good face with the default generator. It takes either a high amount of luck, or a high amount of skill though. i actually managed to get a pretty good face from the default parts (it was a lucky shot though). I'd like to post it, but don't know how

Also, can I use the goth woman in my project?

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Oh, no doubt, Oddball. I think the stock material inside the generator itself is highly useful and you can good get faces from it. In fact, I'd say that the randomly generated face I started with is aesthetically pleasing.

What I'm hoping people can learn from this tutorial is how to create the characters they have actually envisioned by learning to take the stock material and break the limitations of the generator. A whole new level of variety and options open up, I hope.

If you want to post your face upload your image to a photo sharing website such as Imgur, go to the image tab on the comment editor here on the forum, and copy/paste in the URL that Imgur generates for your image.

Edit: I saw your question about using the face and I'm inclined to say no because she was made rather quickly and a little sloppily for the purpose of this tutorial. She is also still a WIP as more steps will be added on to this tutorial.

 

[Oddball]

you do know i meant this one right? just to be clear

 

[Ms Littlefish]

Oh, no. That's one of my characters. Not for anyone's use other than my own. 

 

[Oddball]

Oh, no. That's one of my characters. Not for anyone's use other than my own. XD

ok. i wont use it in my game then

 

[nio kasgami]

Interesting art~ hum but I am not a fan of editing I prefer doing all by myself and I suck at editing : /

but usefull for people who want to edit the creepy awesome generator character~

 

[Ms Littlefish]

I too would prefer to customize all my art but I do enjoy the generator parts a lot when used this way. While I can draw I am quite slow at it, fumble with it, struggle to get things consistent, and am unsure I can do it on the volume needed for a game. And I wanted to share this so people who don't have a lot of art skills or lack the cash for custom resources (this is more a hobby of mine after all) can still get a personal touch on their game by just learning a few photo editing tools. 

 

[Ruby]

Random Face -

I can't say he was completely random, but this was the face I started with.

After following the Tutorial -

This is what I came up with. ^_^ I think he is rather adorable. <33333

 

[mlogan]

This is actually pretty fun! For those who might be wondering, I used Gimp, as I didn't have the mental capacity to deal with figuring out that CS2 install this morning.

The only thing I didn't use the same as in the randomly generated face was the skin tone, everything else was the same. Also, this is just basic positioning and sizing. I haven't done any coloring or anything. Also, when I go back to edit more, I will move the facial features down, just a touch, per Ms Littlefish's suggestion. These really are fun to play around and get creative with.

Having too much fun this morning. Started a male figure too. I would like to make him to look older, so I will have to do some work on some skin aging, maybe a scar as well. But this is him for now.