Fast and robust face-to-parameter translation for game character auto-creation

With the rapid development of Role-Playing Games (RPGs), players are now allowed to edit the facial appearance of their in-game characters with their preferences rather than using default templates. This paper proposes a game character auto-creation framework that generates in-game characters according to a player's input face photo. Different from the previous methods that are designed based on neural style transfer or monocular 3D face reconstruction, we re-formulate the character auto-creation process in a different point of view: by predicting a large set of physically meaningful facial parameters under a self-supervised learning paradigm. Instead of updating facial parameters iteratively at the input end of the renderer as suggested by previous methods, which are time-consuming, we introduce a facial parameter translator so that the creation can be done efficiently through a single forward propagation from the face embeddings to parameters, with a considerable 1000x computational speedup. Despite its high efficiency, the interactivity is preserved in our method where users are allowed to optionally fine-tune the facial parameters on our creation according to their needs. Our approach also shows better robustness than previous methods, especially for those photos with head-pose variance. Comparison results and ablation analysis on seven public face verification datasets suggest the effectiveness of our method.