Anyone out there have experience going from taking a photo of a face---> sing it in a games. I guess the process goes something like 1. take picture 2. use facial mapping software 3. apply it to a model 4. put in proper format 5. load from c++/vb If anyone out there has been through this can they tell me what they used to get the job done? Poser 5 comes with a handle tool to do alot of the work but I would rather use Character studio.

You do it like you do anything else in a game, with UVmaps, there''s no facial mapping tool.

Ideally, you take front/side/back photos of the face and combine them together in Photoshop (or whatever you use) into a position natural for UVW (that means, you should know how to properly unwrap a head and then you''ll know how to properly lay out the face images).
Then you unwrap the head UVW and tweak it to make it fir the combined image.

If you have access to any editable games like Q3, UT/UT2, etc you''ll see how faces are painted, and that''s the way you''d have to compbine your face photos and lay out your UVW.

That is the hard way to do it. There are tools out there for assisting in doing this but I have never heard anyone talk about them..

Id give the hard way a try if you know any tutorials then lets me know.

Worse case I guess I guess use a sphere and wrap a face on it. but its gonna look stupid.

Poser 5 has a great tool for this but I can''t seem to export it to something useful

This probably doesn''t help you, but what I usually do is I take a picture of a person''s head (font and side views) and use them as references for creating the head. Then, after the model is done, I use the front image to map onto the head. But first, I copy the skin (clone brush) to get rid of the the hair and the background (so its like a skin texture). Also get rid of the eyes and blur out the middle of the mouth. Then, in a 3d program, use a texture tool in a planar projection to position the face onto the head. Then generate and assign the UVW coordinates and you are set.

(Granted, I know the eyes need work and the texture is a little shiny, but here is the results of this technique...)

that seems like alot of work too. I can create beautiful version of me like

www.punkouter.com/sexy.jpg

using poser 5. But when I export it to OBJ I seem to be losing alot.

Maybe poser 5 is making use of rendering techniques that are not supported by the OBJ file format....

Things like normal mapping, bump mapping, specular mapping, displacement mapping.