Super Adventures in Face Editors II

This week on Super Adventures, I've decided that what my site really needs is more screenshots of faces. It's been exactly five years to the day since I published my Super Adventures in Face Editors article comparing different character creators in video games, so I figured it was time for a sequel. Last time I tried recreating Metal Gear Solid protagonist Solid Snake in games like Skyrim, Dark Souls and Mass Effect, but this time around I've got brand new games and a brand new video game star: Tomb Raider hero Lara Croft.

I don't mean the pointy polygon-head Lara with the painted-on face, I mean the more realistic version you can see in the picture above. Though I'll be going through the games in chronological order again, to observe how the visuals and the editors become more sophisticated over time, so you'll be seeing a horrifying low-poly head soon enough.

---

Rise of the Tomb Raider

I was playing Rise of the Tomb Raider at the time I came up with the idea for this article, so Lara Croft seem liked a pretty obvious choice to go with. She hasn't been around quite as long as Solid Snake but she's as iconic as video game characters get, and I could take reference shots as I played.

So I made sure to get as many good shots from as many different angles as I could. The better images I had to work from, the more chance I had to get her face looking right.

Tomb Raider 2013

But then I realised that even the artists on Rise hadn't managed to get her face looking right! She must have had plastic surgery between games. So I downloaded Tomb Raider 2013 and took lots of screenshots from that instead. I know they both have an equal claim to being the true Lara Croft, but her 2013 look is the one that's been registered in my brain.

But after replaying an hour or two of that I came across these beautiful renders of the cutscene model and had to face the fact that all those screenshots I'd been taking could go straight into the bin. I couldn't ask for a more perfect reference than this. So this is the goal, in each game I'm going to try to recreate this face.

Though I'll probably screw around with the sliders a bit first and see what other creations it's capable of constructing.

2004 - THE URBZ: SIMS IN THE CITY (PLAYSTATION 2)

Okay, first I have to mention that the whole time I was using The Urbz's character creator I had to listen to a looping hip hop track recorded in Simlish, and honestly it was probably the best thing about it. They apparently got the Black Eyed Peas to provide several tracks for the game; I don't know if it was one of theirs playing but it's catchy.

The editing part of the editor is a bit crap though, especially compared to The Sims 2, which came out two months earlier. There's just five hairstyles to pick from, none of them look like Lara's ponytail, and you can't even change the colour. You can't change the colour of the eyes either, or their size, you can just cycle through a few shapes. Same with the other facial features. You can at least stretch the face wider or taller with sliders but that's the limit of your fine-tuning abilities. So any resemblance to Lara Croft here is purely accidental.

Plus she wouldn't stop smiling! How am I supposed to get the lips to match when she's got a permanent grin?

2008 - WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES (PLAYSTATION 3)

I've jumped ahead a generation to the PS3 for White Knight Chronicles and it's a definite step up. For one thing there are actual sliders here to adjust the shape of different facial features! You start off by selecting from a gallery of different templates, but then it lets you refine it from there, tilting the eyes and raising the nostrils etc. The character even keeps still while you work and you can rotate them properly to see what you're doing. Even the music's pretty nice.

The trouble is that it's designed to make anime characters, not Laras, and I found I was maxing out sliders as I tried to force it to give me the face I wanted. It doesn't help that it's missing some of the obvious sliders like 'mouth width'.

Anyway, here's my Lara Croft:

Sorry I couldn't zoom in any closer than that.

The editor loses points for not giving me the right hairstyle, but gains 5 million points for letting me add the mole under her eye! I guarantee that's a feature that won't be showing up often in this article. But overall this doesn't look a whole lot like Lara.

2009 - DEMONS' SOULS (PLAYSTATION 3)

Demons' Souls' editor is a pain in the ass to use, and not just because the character you're working on is so small. It's a bit like Oblivion's editor, as when you move one slider, a bunch of others decide to move as well, and the face distorts in ways you're not expecting. Though it's hard to really know what to expect, with slider names like these. It was doing well at first, with a 'Femininity/Masculinity' slider, but then it came out with things like 'Face Asperity' and 'Features Inclination'.

There's no presets to start you off this time and it doesn't seem to give you much control over the shape of the eyes, which is annoying as they're kind of crucial if you're going to make someone recognisable. It tries to give you control over the shape of the mouth at least, but it ended up looking wrong whatever I did. It's a good editor if you want create a mess, it's got that capability, but I'm not sure how capable it is at making Laras.

Here's my best attempt. I got the proportions pretty close I think! At least from the front.

The editor gets a couple of bonus points for giving me some kind of ponytail to select and letting me fine tune the hair colour... and then loses a point for only having 9 hairstyles to choose from. It gets massive bonus points for the keeping the character perfectly still during editing and letting me turn the camera to any angle, but it loses massive points for all the facial hair being painted on. Badly.

Final verdict: It's definitely better than The Urbz.

2010 - STAR TREK ONLINE (PC)

Star Trek Online has a more powerful character creator than most, when it comes to creating aliens anyway. You can just pick one of a huge set of established Trek aliens and start fine-tuning their forehead, but if you're feeling creative there's a custom alien editor in here to build your own from the bits of rubber lying around in the makeup department.

You start off by choosing a preset head but then you can go nuts with skin patterns, bumpy foreheads, giant ears, whatever, and then stretch them into inhuman proportions. It also lets you adjust the body, so if you want to create a character with a long neck, skinny arms, and giant hands, that's definitely an option.

Here are some of the aliens I got out of the thing without thinking too hard about it. The game has to hold the record for the amount of different species you can play as in an RPG. Oh damn, it's just occurred to me that I should've tried making some aliens from other sci-fi franchises. It's too late now though, there's no room left in the image.

The trouble with this editor is that it's a bit more restricted when it comes to fine tuning a human face. It's got plenty of sliders, but I wished I could change the tilt of the nose and alter the shape of the eyes myself instead of picking from a list of five presets.

So this is the best Lara Croft I could come up with:

She came out better than I expected to be honest, though you'll have to take my word for that because she's too microscopic to be perceived with the naked eye. I can zoom out more, but if there's a way to zoom in any closer I couldn't find it.

A bigger problem is that the character never stops moving and it's bloody annoying. I mean that's true of a lot of editors, but in this the movement's pretty excessive and it really does make it a challenge to tell what you're doing. To get my final picture I had to wait and hit the screenshot key at the exact moment she was actually facing forward.

On the plus side I was able to give Lara something resembling her ponytail, though you'll have to take my word from that because there's no mirrors. I was tempted to give her the classic Trek beehive hair look instead, there's lots of hairstyles to pick from here, but nah.

2012 - DRAGON'S DOGMA (PC)

One thing I've discovered from playing around with all these character creators is that you don't typically have to play through a whole prologue level first before you get to use them. Most games put the editor right at the start so you can jump right in and get making faces immediately. Unfortunately Dragon's Dogma is one of the games where you do, and that gets even more annoying when you need to put it back on again to check something. Didn't they learn anything from Mass Effect 2?

On the plus side, it's a pretty great looking editor and you can make some good looking faces in it (with proper beards). You get to pick from a large gallery of presets for different facial features, then fine tune with sliders. Trouble is, there aren't a lot of sliders. I mean look at the options I've got here to adjust the nose. I can change the height and the size (actually the width), and that's it. You can't change the jaw width, cheek depth, chin length, anything like that, except by scrolling through 48 pictures.

You can at least see what you're doing though, thanks to good lighting and a character that stays still, for the most part. Okay here's my attempt at Lara:

It's not quite there, but she's looking pretty good I think. It helps that I was able to find the right hair style... more or less. I also got lucky as I was able to match Lara's proportions without the missing sliders. I guess she must have a fairly default face.

I didn't try to match her body type (other than getting her height right) but there's plenty of presets for arms, legs and torso as well. Overall, this editor's pretty good, but it's more about choosing from a set of pictures than playing with sliders.

Then a little while into the game you get to do it all over again to make yourself a sidekick!

2012 - PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2 (PC)

I wasn't expecting much from Phantasy Star Online 2's editor, so I was surprised when it gave me everything. Well, except for templates for individual facial features, and sliders. Instead it has these dots that you drag around to alter parts of the face. It also has a 'face morphing option' which lets you pick four different things like 'hot-blooded' or 'cool adult' and drag the dot between them to add more of that shape into the mix.

It's great for creating your own characters and you can get some real gold out of that 'Randomize All' button, but it's not so great at nailing an existing character, especially one with realistic proportions. When I tried to create Lara Croft I was really dragging things to their maximums and it still wasn't enough, so this is the best I managed:

All these hairstyles, two pages of them, and I couldn't find one that even came close to matching her hair. They're not much into parting their hair in the middle in the PSO universe I guess. At least I got her hair colour close, thanks to the game having an actual colour picker instead of just giving you a dozen shades to choose from.

The editor has another amazing feature that all these games could use: a save option! I was playing around with the randomise button when I thought of something else I could do to improve the Lara character I'd made earlier, so I clicked the load button and there she was. I didn't have to recreate the whole face from scratch like I would've had to do with any other game.

It also makes a sci-fi sound every single time you click anything. Every time you move the cursor over anything as well. Not sure I'd call that a feature though, it's more of a test of endurance.

Oh, before I move on I just want to talk about the character classes for a moment. There's four different kinds: humans, some other kind of human, another kind of human, and actual robots. This thing couldn't look more Gundam without getting the developer sued.

But every class has two genders and these are the male robots, so you might be wondering what the female versions of these guys look like. Did they paint them pink and put a bow on top?

Nope they just made them look like women!

Their outfits aren't even much different to what the other classes wear (the costumes in this game are... creative).

2013 - SAINTS ROW IV (PC)

I already covered Saints Row IV back in my Solid Snake article, the game's been around a while, but it has one of the most powerful character creation tools I've ever used so I'm playing around in it again. Trouble is your character won't stop moving around and breathing while you're trying to edit them, and it's annoying! Plus the game occasionally throws a glitchy effect over the top just to make it even harder to see what you're doing.

But its biggest problem is one it shares with all editors: it doesn't give me unlimited power to sculpt faces as I please. You can come up with some real monsters if you max out the sliders, but they don't seem to be powerful enough to let me make an accurate Lara Croft. I was fighting the game's exaggerated cartoony style and I don't think I won.

Here's what I ended up with:

The head's a little too wide, but it's almost there I think. I had a real problem trying to get the proportions right because she's tilting her head backwards slightly in the editor, and leaning forwards slightly in my reference image.

It also took me a while to get the right hair, but only because there's an endless list of hairstyles to scroll through and they're not grouped into categories. I'm giving the hair options a big thumbs up, the scar options too. Beards, on the other hand, have to get a thumbs down. They're basically just painted on, with a bit of normal mapping magic to give them some depth. That's exactly what you want for scars, but it's not great for elaborate moustaches or bushy beards.

2013 - GRAND THEFT AUTO V (PC)

Grand Theft Auto V, it turns out, is another one of those games that makes you play a while before you can start making a character. You can only make a custom character inside the GTA Online mode and you need to finish the prologue before it unlocks, so I had to go rob a bank before I got to make my Lara.

The game has an unusual way of getting you started on making a face, as first you have to choose your character's parents. Then you get to drag some sliders to adjust the balance of their genetic inheritance, so you're kind of morphing between their younger selves. It's a bit like The Movies' character creator that I played with in the last article, except it comes with a few celebrity faces (like John Marston from Red Dead Redemption and Niko Bellic from GTA IV). If I'd found Lara's parents in there that would've made this a lot simpler, but I wasn't so lucky.

Once you've picked their parents you get to edit the face... slightly. There's few sliders to make the chin wider or raise the cheekbones etc., but it's pretty limited. The shape of the eyes is purely determined by their parents and I couldn't even lower her mouth a bit. Or lower her head so I was looking straight at her instead of up. It lets you turn the head completely left or completely right to check the side view and that's all you get.

So my Lara doesn't have a whole lot of resemblance to the character sadly. I think she'd do alright as a Lara Croft cosplayer though.

On the plus side, the cursor turns to a middle finger when you hover the mouse over an option... though I can't show you that. I can show you all the different options there are for adjusting the skin though.

In most editors you're lucky if you get one slider to adjust the skin, but skin is apparently GTA V's passion! I was even able to put a mole next to her eye. It's under the wrong eye, but it's still better than most. And the hairstyle's pretty close too. It's lucky she's got dark brown hair, instead of bright pink or neon green, because the game doesn't do weird. Only natural shades here; it's surprisingly limited.

I should be happy that I was able to make a female character at all I suppose, seeing as GTA's only ever had male leads. Well, since the switch to proper 3D anyway.

2014 - THE SIMS 4 (PC)

I already played around with The Sims 4's character creator in the first article, but I only had the demo back then so I decided to give the proper version a try this time. Though honestly there isn't much difference and I'm just using that as an excuse to play around with it again. It's awesome to actually be able to drag parts of the face directly instead of messing around with sliders and having to experiment to find out what they change! It's so much faster as well.

Every part of the face has its own gallery of presets, so you can choose the shape you want first, then start clicking on the face itself to drag them around, resize them, rotate them etc. Then you can go into Detail Edit mode to fine tune them. You can even choose the shape of your character's teeth, which has to be a first.

It's a great system, the only trouble is it didn't quite give me enough separate sections to drag and it didn't let me drag them very far. Plus a gallery of presets is great, but having front and side views for each of them would've been a help.

So this is my Lara. She looks a bit cartoony, because it's a cartoony game, but I don't think she's that bad.

I was fortunate that the character has pale skin, because the colour options are surprisingly limited and the darker skin tones apparently have issues. It's supposed to be getting fixed in December, with a hundred new skin tone swatches being added, along with a slider to fine tune the brightness, but it wasn't fixed when I used it.

Also the editor doesn't let you have awesome scars, which is an obvious omission. Though you can fine tune whether your character can become pregnant or use the toilet standing up, and that's a level of detail you don't generally get in these things.

2014 - DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION (PC)

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the third of the Dragon Age games, so the team wasn't new to character editors. It's using a new engine though and this guy's new as well, as they've added Qunari to the list of races you can make, joining Elves, Dwarves and Humans.

One thing I liked about this editor right from the start is how I was able to get straight into it without having to sit through an intro first. Then I clicked 'select' instead of 'customise' when I was picking a preset head and that apparently means 'I'm done, start the game!', so I had to wait through the bloody intro after all to get to the menu and start again.

The editor starts you off by choosing a preset, then you get to refine it. Not just for the face overall, but the eyes, nose and mouth as well. There's not a huge amount of shapes, but I'll take that over having no shapes. The most interesting thing about this editor is that you fine tune the shapes by dragging a crosshair around a box, so it's like moving two sliders at once, except faster! It's a very speedy editor, which helps when you're trying to spot what's actually changing on the model.

Another thing I liked about it is that it zooms in properly so you can fill half the screen with the head, and the character keeps relatively still while you're editing them. Okay, here's what my human noble rogue archer looks like:

I think that's... alright. Kind of getting there. I feel like I could maybe do a better job on a second try. Trouble is I can't tilt the head down to match my reference image like I can in some other editors. From side view it looked great!

The game doesn't come with the right hair for her though unfortunately. Almost 30 different hair styles and it doesn't have any proper ponytails at all. I wasn't all that amazed with the almost 30 kinds of facial hair either, though to be fair I haven't tried playing a Dwarf yet. And as much as I appreciate all the colour options it gave me, like selecting the inner and outer iris colour from a colour wheel, it's hard to get the tone exactly right when I'm working in a green smoky void. Plus there's no anime colours for hair! It does have scars though, I'll give it that. Plus you can even move them around!

Overall, this isn't the most powerful editor I've used, but it's fast, painless to use and pretty high up on my list of favourites. And now I'm halfway through the games! 10 down, 10 to go.

2015 - METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN (PC)

There's nothing all that innovative about The Phantom Pain's character editor, it's just presets and sliders, and sadly the sliders don't slide that far. Plus it's pretty limited in skin, hair and eye colours, and hair styles as well for that matter. There's not really much scope to go wild here. On the positive side it's well lit, the face takes up a lot of the screen, the guy stays put, and there's a little circle on the model to let you know exactly what you're editing.

The thing is though, you can only make a female character in the Metal Gear Online multiplayer mode and to do that you need to unlock a new character slot by reaching level 6. Which I'm not going to do. So I've got no Lara to show you this time! Sorry!

2015 - FALLOUT 4 (XBOX ONE)

Fallout 4 is another one of those games where the characters can't keep their heads still while you're editing them, and worse they actually grin and talk about stuff! I do like how the male and female characters are separate people who hang out in the character creator together though. That's a feature you don't see in anything else.

You start by picking from a preset head, then you can pick from presets for the mouth, eyes, nose etc. and fine tune them by clicking on the model. It's a bit more complicated than just dragging the face directly though, as you can also twist and scale some objects. It's a good editor for creating people like this guy, less good for accurately recreating Lara Croft. Though they did at least let me tilt her head down a little so it matched the reference I'm working from.

Can you see Lara in there? I can't really. Maybe in the eyes and nose, but I had some trouble with the lips as you can't adjust the shape much. Plus despite all the hair options, I couldn't find the right ponytail to give her either.

2016 - TYRANNY (PC)

I was hoping for a bit more from Tyranny's character creation than just picking one of five faces and choosing a haircut, but that's all you get.

You wouldn't think that'd give me enough scope to really craft my own Lara Croft replica, but the game also lets you import your own portrait. This means that Tyranny is actually the only game in this whole article to feature a 100% accurate Lara... as long as you don't look too closely at the 3D model.

2017 - MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA (XBOX ONE)

The Mass Effect games are great for a lot of reasons, though the character creation is maybe not one of them, and Andromeda carries on the tradition of being merely alright at face editing. It's nowhere near as good as Dragon Age: Inquisition, but it's alright. I'm just happy I didn't have to sit through a whole intro before I got to use it this time.

You pick a face type from a selection of 10 (after waiting ages for each of them to load), then you slide the features around a bit. Not too much though, as the sliders only go so far! You're stuck with the eyes, nose and mouth shapes that came with the preset, but the eyebrows are part of the 'complexion' slider so you can adjust them at least, and for the first time in a Mass Effect game they've finally let me change the nose and mouth width! Hair styles are on a numbered slider as well (with a decimal place), with about 20 options, and so are all the weird types of makeup and tattoos and painted-on beards you can stick on afterwards. Seems that the Andromeda Initiative isn't as strict about your appearance as the Citadel Spectres are.

Plus it has a colour wheel... just not for hair. You can precisely set the colour of the inside and outside of the iris separately, but you're limited to the shades of hair dye provided.

So this is the Lara I got out of it. Best hair I could find I'm afraid, though it doesn't come with a ponytail. I think the eyes look kind of close, but that's pure fluke as that's the eye shape it gave me. Once again I got lucky that Lara has a bit of a 'default' face, in face editor terms. She was very close to having the default name as well, as this character started off being called Sara.

Incidentally, this is the only face editor I've used which uses the triggers to rotate the character, which is kind of awkward. Though at least I can get a proper side on view in this, which earlier Mass Effects weren't interested in. I'm not sure it's a huge improvement otherwise though, especially as it looks surprisingly last gen.

Also it's missing the code that lets you share your creations! Sure you can just download them straight from the internet now, but I went searching for other people's Lara Crofts on the website and quickly realised that they don't have names on them, so that wasn't going to work.

2017 - MONSTER HUNTER WORLD (XBOX ONE)

Monster Hunter World sure made me wait a while for my character creator. I had to skip through a million messages just to get to the menu ('do you want to give us telemetry?', 'here's all the update notes' etc.) and after I started the game I got an unskippable intro! But I stuck with it (I left the room and did something else for ten minutes) and my perseverance paid off as I eventually got to play with the face maker!

The first thing I noticed is that it has some nice looking hair. I couldn't find Lara's ponytail, but what I could find was very well rendered. The editor features 20 beards and moustaches, and almost 30 hairstyles. Plus it has a decent colour picker that lets you pick the shade you want... as long as you want something natural and normal. No weird faces allowed.

You get set of presets to pick from for each element of the face and then you can fine tune them a little by adjusting the position, sometimes even adjusting the size! It's not all that powerful (you can't even change the nose width), but at least it's fast.

This was the best Lara I could come up with, though I'm not sure I picked the most ideal features I could've. I kept flipping back and forth through them trying to decide and I was never happy with any of them. You can also see on the right that I've been pushing sliders to their limit. I wish I could make the chin a little less pointy and bring the eyebrows down a bit, but those sliders just don't have a lot of range.

Some of these editors have had unique features I've never seen elsewhere and Monster Hunter World has one too. After choosing the eye makeup you want, you have to apply it yourself, sliding it into place like a decal. I can't really see a benefit to doing it this way, but it's definitely unusual.

Oh, plus you also get to make a cat squire sidekick! Not a whole lot of games have come with a cat editor so far.

You can change the fur thickness, fur length, fur pattern, fur colour... lots of fur options. You don't get many options to adjust the face (there was no hope of me using this to make a Lara Cat) but you can pick from a few presets for the ears, eyes, and tail.

Alright, just five games left now. We're in the final stretch.

2018 - EA SPORTS UFC 3 (XBOX ONE)

You can tell right away I didn't have much luck with UFC 3. It actually has sliders, which puts it way ahead of the other EA Sports games I tried, (NBA Live 19, Rory McIlroy PGA Tour) but it's hard to see what they're changing. I mean it paints the area that'll be altered for a moment so I knew where the effect would be, but the sliders move so damn slowly that it was hard to perceive the change. It didn't help that the character wouldn't keep their damn head still. It's not getting any less frustrating trying to fine tune features on someone who's moving all over the place.

But the biggest problem I had is how much of a character's look is determined by the preset's skin. I could slide and stretch her features all I wanted, trying to get them in the precise proportions, but I couldn't fix those eyes.

Fortunately it's possible to upload your own face texture and use that, so this could theoretically produce the most perfect Lara Croft face of any of these programs.

Trouble is it doesn't bloody work, at least not for me.

Plus it let me pick the character's last name from a list, but Croft wasn't there! And I could pick a nickname, but Tomb Raider wasn't there! Also it's got 26 hairstyles and they're all rubbish.

Man, I hope this next editor's a bit more impressive.

2019 - BLACK DESERT (XBOX ONE)

The first thing that caught me out in this editor was your character's sex is decided by your chosen class, so my plan to make Lara a female Archer was foiled at the first step.

Second thing that caught me out is that the interface is weird. You start by picking from the tiniest of preset images, pressing the button on each one in turn to load the preview so you can see what it actually looks like. Then you get to make adjustments, either by holding a button and using the left stick, or by going to the other mode and using all the sliders. 'Holding a button' mode is definitely faster, but it paints a creepy skull on your characters face so you can't tell what you're doing!

Each of these pale shapes is a section that can be dragged around, resized, and tilted, which makes this one of the most powerful editors I've used. Trouble is you don't know what moving the stick is going to do until you've done it, and sometimes not even then. A few times I got the nose looking just right from the side, then turned the face to the front to discover that it'd been knocked way off centre.

It's a bit of a pain in the ass to use really, and the PC version's only slightly less awkward, but this is what I managed to come up with before my patience ran out:

Most of the time I feel like I'm pushing against the editor's limits, but in this case I feel like someone who knows their way around this tool could come up with a more accurate Lara than this. Someone who knows what the hell 'length', 'width' and 'depth' mean when it comes to rotation. Someone who has the patience to wait for these slow-ass sliders to move on the Xbox version. There's a lot of power here for the stubborn.

Still, it kind of looks like her I reckon! It's mostly the nose that's really letting it down. Well, that and the hair, as I couldn't find a proper ponytail for her or get the colour right. I was able to drag and curve the front around to get it out of her face and cover up her elf ears though, so that worked out at least. When it comes to hair editing, this is top of its class.

The character creator also lets you do the same kind of sculpting with your character's body, which is cool. It's just a shame that all the time you're in the editor you have to listen to them going 'huh', breathing, and making other noises that distract you from the dramatic fantasy music. At least the character keeps their head still more or less.

Black Desert originally came out in 2015 by the way, but I moved it down the list because it got a graphical overhaul in 2018, just before this Xbox One version came out. I can definitely believe that these are remastered graphics, as it looks all kinds of pretty. But mostly the weird glowing kind of pretty (I had to give her quite dark skin so I wouldn't be blinded).

2018 - DELTARUNE: CHAPTER ONE (PC)

I tried my best with Deltarune's character creator, but as far as I can tell none of these heads has a ponytail. They don't have any facial features either and there's no way to stick any onto them.

The game thought my creation was wonderful, but it wasn't very Lara, sadly.

2019 - THE OUTER WORLDS (PC)

The Outer Worlds is following in the footsteps of Fallout: New Vegas and the Mass Effect games so you'd expect it to have a fairly solid face editor. You'd be wrong though, as this is surprisingly basic.

It lets you choose between 30 preset faces (15 male, 15 female) and then you can slide the features around a bit, but that's pretty much it. There's no Photofit eye/mouth/nose selection, no fine tuning of small details, and the beard selection is limited. Also the hair seems really dark and metallic for some reason. I put the graphics settings to max, so this is the best the hair can look.

Anyway here's my Lara:

Doesn't look anything like her! Well, maybe a little, but not because of anything I've done. I just picked the preset with the most resemblance. The game doesn't come with ponytail hair either but you can't tell from this angle.

There's 30 hairstyles but just 9 kinds of facial hair (including 'none'), so your options are even more limited there. On the plus side the character doesn't move around too much while you're performing facial surgery. Also the male and female faces both share the same selection of hair, beards, makeup, and glowing purple eyes, which isn't a bad thing. Though it does mean you'll likely want to make some tweaks after hitting the randomise button if you're after something more conventional.

Okay, one last game.

2019 - FOOTBALL MANAGER 2020 (PC)

Football Manager 2020 doesn't have a great character creator.

Sure you can see plenty of sliders in this image and it gives the impression that there's some power in this editor, but I didn't drag them to extremes to create a monster, I just dragged them at all. You get three positions for each slider and that's it! Plus the facial hair is all painted on and female managers get barely any hairstyles to pick from.

Though it does have one thing that the other editors haven't had so far...

I've finally found a game with a working photo importer!

The model quality is a bit '2006' and I didn't get to set many points on the face or import a side view, but it worked! It used my image to generate a mesh, so the imported face fits properly and works in three dimensions.

It's kind of cheating though for me I think, so I'm going to leave the game out of the comparison grid I'm about to show (it's got nothing to do with the fact that I've got a nice even number of faces already).


CONCLUSION

---

Well the winner definitely isn't The Urbz or UFC 3.

I'm not sure which I'd say is most accurate though. Black Desert's I'd hope, seeing as it's the one that gave me the most control. Dragon's Dogma looks pretty good as well.

But I was wondering, what would happened if I took each of these images and morphed them together? They're all supposed to be the same face, so would combining them all filter out the inaccuracies and reinforce the features that I got right? Or would it just be a fuzzy mess that looks like no one?

To increase my chances of success I dropped The Urbz and added in a second attempt at Black Desert to bring the total back up to 16, because c'mon just look at that Urbz face! I don't want that pointy jaw and grin messing up my experiment. Plus I edited that Monster Hunter World face a bit so you can see both eyes.

Okay, here it is, 15 games combined into one shot:

Not entirely what I was expecting to be honest.

It seems a bit implausible that you can take such varied faces with different styles and polygon counts and end up with something so clean and sharp looking, so I won't be offended if you feel you have to morph them all together yourself to verify it. Actually, I'll save you the effort, here's a image that shows the whole process: click for the pic.

I didn't quite nail it, that much is plainly obvious; she doesn't look like Lara. I think the way the editors tilt the head in different ways threw me off, plus some of the games didn't let me fine tune features properly and I had real problems getting the eyebrows to go low enough. But just as a person it looks surprisingly great I think. Where's the face editor that makes characters that look like that, huh?

Seems like the moral of the story is that it's easier to make a Lara Croft than it is to make a more distinctive character like Solid Snake, and I'm sure someone else can do a much better job of it than I did. Also I kind of want to play around with my morph software some more now. Stay tuned for my 'Super Adventures in Morphing 16 Pictures of Luigi I Found' article at some point I guess. Unless I find that I'm too busy actually playing games.

---

Thanks for reading! Super Adventures will return with an actual game next time, though what the game is you'll have to tell me. I've given you a clue to help you out, but it's a tough one this time.

You can also leave a comment about video game face editors if you want, or drop by our cosy Super Adventures Discord.