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Hello. Firstly please forgive me if here is wrong place for my question, and if so, please tell me where can I ask my question. And also forgive me for question tags; I could not found good tags for this question.

I want to make some photos from someone who does not really exist. But I don't know where should I start. It might sounds stupid but I wanted to make a 3D head model by FaceGen Modeller and take renderes of that to use in Photoshop, but even FaceGen can't make photos as realistic as I want. I don't know, Is there any program that generates super-realistic(!) heads in various camera angles?

What would you do if you were me?

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I'd suggest if you want photo-realism, generating a face isn't the best approach. What's the best, most realistic CGI face you've ever seen in a big budget movie? Think Avatar or Beowulf - worked on by teams of top specialists with the world's best software and hardware - and they still don't quite look photo realistic. I don't know exactly what you're trying to do, but I'd suggest looking low-tech, using real photos of real people e.g. stock photography or hiring a friend/wannabe model. (Or, get as good as/better than the best in the world at Zbrush, Cinema4d or Maya & Mudbox really fast!) – user568458 Aug 5 '12 at 21:53

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Not exactly the answer you are looking for (different angles), but an example of something that can be done with overlapping pictures. When I read your question I instantly thought of "the average face", an experiment that used photos overlay to generate population's averages: http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average

enter image description here

This site lets you play around with some pre-determined photos, but you could try something similar (not sure which software would be better for this, any ideas?). Problem is, unless you have pictures of different people in different angles, and overlay the same ones... you will only get frontal pics. But it's a plan B (or C) to consider.

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+1 nice idea! :) If it really needed to be a face that doesn't exist, someone could get a couple of friends or cheap part-time models to pose for an hour for photos at a range of angles under the same lighting, then overlay the photos as required. Not easy, but seems much easier and cheaper than aiming for photo-realistic CGI or digital painting – user568458 Aug 5 '12 at 22:01
Yes, that would be a great way to go. What I don't know for sure is how many pictures you need to get a realistic look. The website seems to have a pretty good algorithm that works perfect with only 2 pics... I wonder if there's any open-source/free software to try something like this – Yisela♦ Aug 5 '12 at 22:10
Thanks, very useful. I'm still looking for new answers. Then I'll choose which way is better. – Moctava Farzán Aug 6 '12 at 11:52

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