Reconstructing a Face Portrait

### On Artbreeder

This is a brief summary of my attempts to reconstruct the Osterby mummy's face for my Bog Bodies project. The same process applies to recreating anime characters, video game toons or movie star faces. But watch out and don't do straight copies of copyrighted stuff or real people or you will be in in trouble!

There are basically 3 steps:

1. I uploaded the exact files shown in Original Files
2. I crossbred them to portraits with a similar face and / or color pallete.
3. I could have edited genes to make the image more to my liking (I didn't in this example)
4. Steps 2 & 3 can be done at the same time using the compose screen. In there you can also put multiple images of the same face from different sources to make it more likely to get the best likeness. But the compose screen is harder to use!

Here's a little movie of the steps

https://www.deviantart.com/renmiri/art/E36badf597b7af30-865955460

But I'll recap what I did: on the section below we have:

* **1st two images on the top right are failures**: The Artbreeder AI struggles with side profiles so I have one straight upload that failed - top left - the second one I added eyes and mouth "clues" but it failed too (top left second picture). Ultimately I had to rotate the face to a more forward fronting picture (bottom right) which is the one I used to move forward.
* **3rd image top right is a failure:** I also struggled to get Artbreeder to "see" Osterby's hair knot. That chubby blonde woman's tiny cowlick was an effort to scan the hair knot.
* **4 images on top left are good**: The ones on the top middle (after the woman) and top right are my final attempts, cross bred with the original mummy to balance the hair color and double check the facial features.

* **Hair: color and knot**: His mummy has a carrot orange hair. I suspect hair might have been more muted orange and what we see is a result of the centuries in the bog so I did 2 versions (2nd and 3rd from the right on top). I also struggled with the hair knot. The female face 3rd top left image has the result of my attempt to put the hair detail on an easy scannable face to see if the charming hair knot would scan. Alas I got a cowlick on her right temple but no knot.. The green skinned top right model has a good hair color. His skin is greenish because his style is almost entirely from the mummy's original scan, and the same goes for the little elf right below him. They served as good steps to get the final model to have a carrot red hair & beard
* **Facial Hair and eyes**: After I rotated the face, I still kept the AI clues for eyes and mouth since we have no valid eyes and mouth color, we would get black areas. I tried to use them as clues for the eye spacing, mouth height and shape for the original Osterby Man. I guessed the lips position based on the teeth height and the eye spacing based on eye sockets center. I had no colors to go with, the only valid color we have is his hair so I guessed he would be a ginger and made eyes amber and facial hair matching hair. For lip color I used a muted brown that would make Artbreeder pick a "regular" lip color. If I used red I would have given the mummy lipstick! Facial hair is a guess so I did a clean shaven version (top right), that model screen is greenish since I was double checking the hair color with the mummy (by doing mummy style close to 100%).

### Original Files: Adding clues for the Artbreeder AI

Osterby Mummy from a thumbnail on googleOsterby Mummy with clues for the AI. Red lips will give the portrait lipstick but this was just the second attemptOsterby Mummy rotated to face forward. Lips changed to muted brown will give a "normal" lip color with no lipstickOsterby Detail - hair knot - From pintereststeps in order to get Osterby (summary)Artbreeder profile on left X Osterby skull on right. Notice the hair color is close and so are the eye, nose, ear and mouth heights