Gameface is something that was introduced to FIFA 10 and for those of you who are unfamiliar with it the core focus of Gameface is to allow the user to create his/her face to be used in a sports title such as FIFA or Tiger Woods.
Gameface started off in beta and to me was a great success, however others have complained of technical problems and issues with getting the software to work for them. I think one key issue could be in the users computer and how good or bad it's graphics capabilities are as I've used gameface on a number of PC's but all have had pretty decent gaming specs to start with.
That aside I am talking about Gameface because I want to address it's positives and negatives and how the gameface itself can evolve to deliver it's users a much better service that really does impress.
Facial Hair
I'm going to start with facial hair as it's something that EA have recently removed much to my dismay. The reason given by "EA_LoicArgelies" who is a gameface developer was:
"Facial hair was one of the first things we had done in the early stage of Game Face, and as the product improved over time, we felt that implementation was no longer on par with our quality expectations. Additionally, numbers showed that a small fraction of users did take advantage of facial hair on their avatar, and therefore with the latest update adding support for female and golfer avatars, along with new outfit items for soccer avatars, we removed facial hair as is - Until such time we can come up with a much stronger implementation".
I found this to be a poor decision, I'm sorry if this offends but I will justify such a strong statement now. The reason I find this to be such a poor decision is because whilst EA may find a small fraction uses it, that small fraction now cannot realistically recreate themselves using gameface which is a large slap in the face when they have had this option previously. I am one of those people and as I stated in my posting on the gameface forums, I have only been clean shaven five times in ten years. So, to have my pro without facial hair makes my VP look as much like myself as it makes Michael Clarke Duncan look like Will Smith. If I were to show my gameface without facial hair to my friends or family they wouldn't have a clue it was supposed to be me, mainly because they don't remember what I look like without my beard.
This leads me onto my major concern about gameface, will it alienate people with facial hair due to removing it? Simply answered, yes it will. Facial hair is just as crucial as getting the eyes, nose, lips, ears or any other feature of the face right, in fact many people in every day life are recognised by their facial hair e.g. Stone Cole Steve Austin, Zach Galifianakis, Ryan Dunn, Kimbo Slice and many more.
Today one of my friends was trying to make a retro VP by creating Ruud Guillit but due to the removal of the gameface facial hair he just couldn’t get the moustache right.
My point is that facial hair is very important and whilst EA’s original facial hair implementation was flat to the face and didn’t look great, it was far better than nothing at all. In all honesty I think EA need to work on implementing facial hair that actually has depth and therefore you can create facial hair like Zach Galifianakis’ or just give yourself a goatee that doesn’t look painted on, either way there really does need to be a facial hair feature for fuzzy face people such as myself.
A major issue with gameface is also in how it reads and applies a users face to an in game/gameface avatar model. Currently you can use a side face and front face image and it will add the facial hair that is around the mouth area (above the lip, below the lip to the chin and a small proportion to the left and right of the mouth), however, it does not add the sideburns or the section of the beard that joins the sideburns to the beard and this is something that needs to be changed.
Gameface works remarkably well in so many areas so it would be great if the gameface software could take more of the side images texture, including facial hair and apply it to the gameface itself.
Here is a photographical based example of what I am talking about:
As you can see, as I mentioned before the gameface software does not take any texture information from the side image and apply it to the gameface.
Hair
Currently Hair I can understand must be a hard area for EA as a haircut, like a mohawk for example, can be cut in many different ways and this goes for all haircuts. Many times I've heard "Oh they don't have my hair" and the main reason for this is that hair is one of the most complex things to create realistically due to the fact that hair is effected by physics, shape, colour, weight and many other factors. Creating a hairstyle is a long and hard process and obviously EA have to make a lot of different styles. Saying "it can't be that hard to make my hair" only shows that all factors have not been considered like how there are billions upon billions of people on earth and everyone's hair looks and moves differently to each others. For this reason I think EA have done very well to create the sheer volume of hairstyles they have and I can only congratulate them on this as they continue to add more colours and varieties. I think my only complaint in this area is that EA have added colours like pink, yellow (not blonde), green, blue etc and still lack in varieties of real style colours such as highlighted hair (dark hairs with light highlights of colours or light coloured hair with dark highlights) as this is very common and the shades of natural browns and blondes. The browns for one is one thing I think they need to work on as there are a lot of different varieties in real life but only three on gameface and one looks so dark it could be mistaken for black.
Eyes
The eyes is another area I think EA have done very well on, there are a large variety of colours and a good system for shaping them. I don't think there is much that can be said about the eyes other than it's done very well. The only improvement I think that can be made is the addition of "eye circles" which are more commonly referred to as "bags under the eyes". I have a sleep problem, in that I don't sleep a lot and this causes quite dark eye circles around my eyes and the option to darken the skin around the eyes via a slider would be a great addition as many people have eye circles even if they are not as predominant as my own.
Eyebrows
I think eyebrows are done to a high enough level and the only thing I could say that needs any work is in adjusting the shape of the eyebrow. At the moment you have two options, brow ridge and forehead depth. These are more to do with the structure of the brow, hence being under the category brow structure, but they are the only way to shape the eyebrows. My suggestion would be to have an actual eyebrow shaping set of tools so that if the eyebrows do not come out right then they can be adjusted.
Nose
As with the eyebrows the nose is done well and the only area I would suggest it be modified is by having one more slider to be able to just the straightness and the “hook” of the nose so you can get a nose with a protruding bone like many people have like the image below:
Mouth
With the mouth I find the tools to be ok but the main issue is the the lip fullness can only be adjusted for both lips, many people have a thin top lip and a fatter bottom lip or vice versa. For this reason I would say that the mouth tool can be improved by splitting the lip fullness to two different sliders, top lip fullness and bottom lip fullness, again this would help create more precise recreation for the user.
Head Shape
One thing I do not like about the gameface is that you are only allowed to change the face width, face fullness and face height which leaves a key option missing, this is face position. Not everyone's face is positioned in the same way and more often than not moving the entire face up a notch or the entire face down a notch can have a drastic effect on how the head as a whole looks. On PES this is very useful for me as I fine more often than not my face needs to be moved up a notch and on FIFA I would say my face needs to be raised a slight amount too. For this reason I would suggest adding a face position slider.
Forehead
Another thing I would say needs a slider is the forehead, some people have very small foreheads, others very large (Antony McPartlin). Trying to adjust the forehead on Gameface means moving other features around to give the right effect but then in-game or even on the gameface when you move it to other angles the face looks out of shape.
Ears
Now this is another area where I cannot recreate myself realistically as there are no options for the ears, let alone flesh tunnels or ear rings. The ear tool itself is missing and there are quite a few sliders I would suggest adding. I would suggest having ear height, ear protrusion and ear placement as these are the basics for creating an ear. Another two things I would say are crucial are ear jewelry (by this I don’t mean hooped earrings and so on but I mean flesh plugs/tunnels/ear slits) and the other other being the ability to change the size of the ear lobes.
Now in sport I understand jewelry is not always allowed so the idea that I could increase the lobe size of my ear and add an ear slit (a small line where ear stretching jewelry would be in the ear). A small touch like this can really add realism. Another idea is to add ear plugs, these are small plugs that fill the hole in the ear as you can see below:
Footballers and other sports players usually use silicon based ones whilst playing sports.
Jaw & Chin
At the moment the only option in Jaw is to change the width, I think the jaw makes a massive difference on the shape of someone's face and for this reason i would say the jaw section really needs a slider or two for defining the jaw shape and definition.
Another key area where Gameface fails for me is in the shaping of the chin, it’s almost as if the program has been designed only for people who are slim in the face and have a pronounced chin. Again if you look at the comparison image of my own gameface you can see that when my gameface generated it decided that rather than my face being very oval that I instead have a very pronounced chin shape, this is something I cannot rectify via the sliders of the jaw, chin or face shape, nothing allows me to shape my jaw and chin correctly.
Summary
To summarise all of what I have said I would say that gameface still has a lot to do in order to really give people the ability to make their gameface look as realistic as it can be but there are a few key areas that need to be addressed which are:
Facial hair – using two images should allow you to capture your full beard and a generic system like the one that has been removed is a crucial addition.
Ears – At the moment you have no control over them, a section needs to be added with a few sliders.
Jaw and chin shape – there are far too few sliders here meaning that someone with an oval or round shaped head will not look right as they will always be given a defined chin unless they are very slim faced.
Specs – I know I did not talk much about the issues of gameface not working for some but there are many it doesn’t work for and I think EA need to add a spec list to the online gameface software so people can be aware of what kind of specs their PC needs to run it properly and what software they need installed as a whole.
So gameface is a great tool and has had some great advances but I still feel there is plenty of room for improvement, what are your views?
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