Hello,
Please note that on the Haptek People Putty site, they have been suggesting for some time now that they are going to be increasing their availability of upper-torso and full-body characters. Possibly if a number of us write to Haptek, they will follow through in that direction.
Haptek does offer an "accessories add-on" for People Putty at an additional price, but I have not purchased and tried it yet.
The animations and lip-sync on People Putty are excellent, but I do agree that the head-only characters, and limited hair, are frustrating.
To make the best of it:
I have found that advance preparation of the source photograph has a drastic affect on the quality of the Haptek character that you create.
To create the best-quality character for Ultra-Hal under present circumstances, I recommend that you experiment with doing the following:
1. Edit your source picture in advance, using any good photo editing software. Make sure you have a good face-on shot, with eyes wide open and mouth shut.
2. Surround the face in your source-picture with a flesh-colored background, using your photo-editing software. This will reduce the amount of masking that you have to do later using People Putty, and that saves memory and improves efficiency.
3. It sometimes helps to "paint" over the eyes of the source picture with flesh-tone or dark-tone, since People Putty provides its own eyes. "Painting" over the original eyes (with the photo editing software) can make the character look more natural when it blinks.
4. Crop your source picture to a square shape. This makes the People Putty "face targeting" procedure much easier to see and do.
5. Save your source picture to at least 400 by 400 pixel resolution.
6. Try at least a half-dozen different attempts when you target your photo into People Putty using the "face mask." Even small changes in your targeting can have a drastic difference in how your final result looks.
7. I believe that there is a step in the face-targeting process where you can choose the resolution in People Putty. Go for the higher resolution (about 400 by 400 pixels if this is works on your computer).
8. Save early and save often, under different file names, so that you can go back and try different approaches to your work.
9. Experiment with putting double-hair on characters. Two different blonde hair add-ons will blend on some characters, and two different brunette hair add-ons will blend on some characters.
All things considered, I think our best present hope is to encourage Haptek to continue to add to People Putty, to allow the creation of upper-torso and full-body characters, and to add substantially more hair variety to their offering.
If they understood that word-of-mouth might sell a lot more units of their software if they did these things, they might take these actions.
Sincerely,
Don
