Cool idea? Combining FaceGen with historical photos

[hefalumps]

This may not be the right forum for this, but I was wondering if any of you mod geniuses out there had any idea how difficult it would be to combine historical photos with FaceGen for future versions of OOTP.

Here's what I mean. I start a historical league in 1970. Pete Rose is playing for the Reds, and his historical photo I have selected for him shows him in a Reds cap. However, later that season, Rose gets traded to Cleveland.

Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way to have Rose's face now with a Cleveland hat and uni?

Now I realize there are several challenges in this. First of all, all the historical photos have the actual face of the player in a different location in the photo and a different size, so it would be almost impossible to automatically generate a hat and uni around them. You'd somehow have to standardize any historical photos you had into a format where the "face" part of the picture matched a certain size and a certain grid coordinates on the image. I imagine that would be difficult.

Did anyone ever play Hardball 5? The real MLB players were in that game, but the team logos weren't. So instead you had extremely accurate "likenesses" of players (they were kind of like drawings of a real photo) wearing hats and uniforms that were the colors of their team. So if you traded Kevin Appier from the Royals to the Giants, that royal blue hat in his picture would suddenly become a dark hat with orange trim. It made player movement a little more exciting when you got to see the player in his new duds on the screen.

So that could be another option - an application that "scans" a historical photo and spits out a standardized FaceGen "likeness" that can then have team hats, colors, unis etc. superimposed. That would really add to the immersion of the game for me if something like that were possible. I know the graphic wizards at ESPN do it all the time as soon as someone is traded, superimposing a Milwaukee cap over one of CC Sabathia's old Cleveland photos. Could something like this ever be possible in OOTP with the FaceGen technology?

Thanks for any input!

[Carplos]

FaceGen itself can take real photos and turn them into FaceGen files--I believe some people here messed around with it before.

[hefalumps]

Really? I'd be curious if anyone has had good results with that!

I think I'll go google FaceGen and find out more about it. Because as it stands now I know next to nothing.

[hefalumps]

I'm downloading the free demo copy now - gonna play with it a little bit and see how it works.

[hefalumps]

Well, I just downloaded the free version of FaceGen to play around with it. I imported photos of Aaron Harang and C.C. Sabathia just to see how FaceGen did with them.

The good news is that it did pretty well - the face was a striking resemblance to the actual player.

The bad news is that I had to manually setup the grid points (outlining edge of the face, eyes, nose, etc.) and then it took about three to five minutes to generate the face.

So there's no way OOTP could do this in game - it would take forever. A modder would have to go through and do photos of every player one by one and release the photo set himself.

And there's still yet another problem - at present there's no way to just provide OOTP with the "face" component of the FaceGen file, at least not that I know of. Every generated face photo in the game is just a png containing the face, hat, uniform, background, etc. So even if we had a zip file full of MLB player face likenesses, we wouldn't have a way to embed them into a photo with the hat and uniform.

I'm guessing that means this is likely impossible, right?

[hewhoms]

Heya Hefalumps. I too would love to see real life players in facegen form to match the fictional faces created by facegen. This has been pretty thoroughly looked into - and someone even made a mod that allows you to import faces directly from facegen into OOTP. Unfortunately it was discovered that the photorealistic (or whatever they are called) photos that facegen makes when you load a real face into the program have an extra layer of graphic OVER TOP the facegen that REALLY makes it look like the player. It is my understanding that ootp can't handle these types of files (and they are pretty big for leagues with 1000's of players). Sooo - it's currently imposible with the way facegen is set up in OOTP.

HOWEVER - what I would like to see in a future version of OOTP is a place where you can load in actual faces (on the screen where you load logos and uniforms maybe?) that fit within the facegen uniforms - and that are in just the right spot so that, obviously they can't age or change the expresion on their faces, they can at least be placed in the right uniform when they switch teams. This can be done MANUALLY now but it is VERRRRRRRRY tedious.

Here are some examples of what the players would look like ---- (and yeah, I'm a BRAVES fan)