Second Life Avatar Smiles: Some Come From FaceApp, Others Are "Natural"

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Last week in my column, I featured this photo above by Jarla Capalini. The naturalistic smile captivated me. I know mesh heads are doing wonders with improving expression in Second Life and made the mistake of assuming that was how this smile was created. However, when Hamlet posted it to the Second Life Friends group on Facebook, several people objected and insisted it had to have been done with FaceApp. I checked with Jarla Capalini in-world and she confirmed that she used FaceApp. 

So, there is an app that creates a beautiful smile, at least in this photo. However, the majority of the other FaceApp examples I’ve seen were not nearly so successful. When I talked to Capalini she explained she tried it with several photos that did not work. The original photo from her blog produced the best result -- comparison below:

Naturalistic SL facial expressions are hard to produce, but they have come a long way from the days when we would turn on talk and slow down animations to catch a smile by saying something other than cheese. If you follow that link, there is a little gif of me saying cheese with my old legacy avatar. 

But that is from SL’s Bronze Age. In the modern era, there is the Lelutka Axis HUD that allows you to move the many individual bones in the face and head to create individual facial expressions. Nastaya’s photo here (right) has a lovely natural smile.

Cassie Middles did a video that shows exactly how completely you can control facial expressions with even more control than FaceApp. She also made a video demonstrating how it works with other mesh heads. So while Jarla made her smile using FaceApp, she also could have used the Axis HUD.

Did you know there is a Flickr group for SL smiles?

That’s where I found this gorgeous smile by Peasant:

 

That group’s where I found Kailee’s vendor photo for The Skinnery evoking the most famous smile in the world:

Maybe we need a new game: Is it SL or FaceApp? Post your own favorites in Comments and challenge us to guess!

See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog.

Comments

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

The Letuka Axis HUD as an inworld tool is limited to some extent to LSL's limitation of no more than 30 simultaneous animations playing at once on an avatar. Depending on what pose tools you use you may run into that limit fast, especially when posing both body and facial bones. Another option to get around this not mentioned in the article is using Black Dragon Viewer's Poser option, but that is slightly hampered by the fact that all changes are reflected only client side, and that only animesh and the logged-in user can be animated by it due to limitations imposed from above. (so it's only viable for selfies and not shots taken with the involvement of other people)

[Jarla]

Yes surely I could have used the axix hud, but I wanted to try FaceApp! lol :)

[Amanda Magick]

Yes I knew it was FaceApp because there is a distinctive look to the nose and then the several smiles that it uses to morph into the pictures face in different ways. I find that close up images work the best with less unsightly smudging or odd pixelation. Ones that are farther away are really hit or miss.

[mily]

I keep seeing this pop up and most of the time it's very disconcerting to me because it's something that is too real on an SL avatar. And other times it just looks really fake