Wednesday, February 3, 2016

A 3D Look at the Past, Part 2

The First Three Fathers
Maybe a real picture of my great grandfather Charles will turn up someday --  but for now, I invented one. The images (above) were made with FaceGen Modeler and FaceGen Artist. There's more detail about how they were created in my earlier post. Charles, however, had to be virtually created from scratch.

Just how to create Charles when no photo is available? By melding images of his mom and dad, of course. An image of his dad was simple, sort of. I created the image of William by processing an image taken from an engraving! But, an image of his mom, Harriet Strope (who had Dutch ancestry), maybe lost to history. I had to resort to doing a Google Images search for "average Dutch female face," which yielded this...

Your typical Mehoopany innkeeper's wife, right? So, William + Dutch Beauty Queen = Charles? But, of course! I shifted the age of the resulting image to 60 years of age and made it a tad more masculine, and there you have it! Instant ancestor.

Now, once I get the hang of full-body 3D modeling I'll be posting a CG six generational reunion portrait!

Obviously, this is more for fun than anything else, but I hope you enjoy my light-hearted ancestral forensic adventure.  Thanks again to FaceGen (http://facegen.com), and for the image of my ideal 3rd great-grandmother, The Postnational Monitor's article, "World of Averages: Europe" (https://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/world-of-averages-europeave/)