1 reply to this topic

[Waldgeist]

Hello REH fans and friends

Since the day REH ended his live is soon approaching, an idea came to my mind. Is it possible to create a virtual 3D bust of REH?

I searched the Internet for different techniques and found this one from a well known german university (Max Planck Institute), which seems to pretty much ideal for the task ahead. I played around with FaceGen and FaceShop, but neither produces results that are good enough, so i contacted the Prof. behind the project and await an answer.

Do you guys perhaps have better photographs at hand of REH, that could help in the process, or do you have a better software that could help? High quality scans, prefereably shot from the front and side would be perfect, because the only pictures i could find are the same listed here in this forum and the quality is not good enough to get good results.

Cheers,
Waldgeist

PS: My main motivation for this is to convince our Developers (Funcom - Age of Conan) to create a shrine in-game for "A creator of worlds" to honor REH.

Edited by Waldgeist, 10 April 2009 - 02:01 PM.

[Taranaich]

Facegen was the program of choice at my university when doing realistic models, but as you said it requires much more high quality shots, and I'm not aware of straight/profile shots of Howard that are of sufficient resolution to be much use. I haven't used FaceShop, but it seems appropraite for 3/4 photos. I generally use the in-house Poser face morphing to make faces for my models, but that requires a lot of fiddling with dials and paramaters.

The largest portrait I've found of REH is this cover for "The Dark Man":



However, a directly uploaded scan of an existing photograph would obviously be preferable.

Sorry I can't be more help (especially since supposedly I got my degree in computer animation!), but this is a really great idea! A wee shrine to REH would be a lovely idea. I've been quite critical of Funcom in their extrapolations and fiddling about with the Hyborian Age, but I couldn't, and wouldn't, fault them for their willingness, nay enthusiasm, to promote REH every opportunity they get.