Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies

In role-playing games (RPGs) such as the modern crime classic Grand Theft Auto, many players create their in-game characters based on their own appearance. Although today's built-in character customization systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they can involve tedious manual adjustments across dozens or even hundreds of parameters, which can take up to several hours to complete. A team of researchers from the Chinese gaming giant NetEase have developed a method to automatically create players' in-game characters from a standard portrait photo. They break down the details of their method the paper Face-to-Parameter Translation for Game Character Auto-Creation. The character generation process starts by aligning the human player's portrait photo, which is used as the training input for a deep learning-based framework comprising an imitator module and a feature extractor.