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gestalt
This is a sample of newly generated faces from a machine learning algorithm.
FM NEWGAN FACES V1
- What is this?
- What are the limitations?
- Why is SI not using this?
- Can I download it?
What is This?I trained a GAN (pretrained StyleGan2), which is a specific type of neural networks, to generate novel faces with a subset of the sortitoutsi-mega-cutout facepack. The goal of a GAN is to generate indistinguishable images compared to the input images. Therefore, it is an ideal approach to generate fotorealistic faces for newgen player inside Football Manager. More info on what a GAN is and what the application are [1].
What Are The Limitations?
First of all, we can not control the properties of a generated image, so we can not say "generate a face with blonde hair and brown eyes and give it a medium teint". This is huge in the context of Football Manager, because we need to generate a face that suits a specific newgen (e.g. african). Although there is hope, because current research tries to solve this problem and morph a image into a similar image that fulfills our desired properties [2]. Additionally, sometimes you will get garbage samples that look like an accident from Frankensteins lab. From my 2000 generated samples I had about 114 bad ones (5.7%). The hardware specification to run the training process are very high. I ran this on a Google Colab instance, this is googles cloud computing platform for AI research and makes use of high-end GPU units. Nvidia used for their pretrained network several high-end GPUs in parallel. One can not replicate this on hardware that the average user has at home. Further, even nvidia trained their networks for several days (afaik 16).
Why is SI not using this?
Beside, some of the limitations mentioned above, SI what need to sort some legal questions. First Nvidia released the StyleGan2 under a specific license that forbids usage in a commercial context. Therfore, they could train their network with a non-commercial dataset for ~200k faces. SI would need to clarify the usage of the GAN technology with Nvidia and have a dataset, which they are allowed to use. Since, Football Manager comes with some faces they might already have a dataset, but it needs to be big enough in size and have some diversity. For example you can not generate east asian faces when your set consists of caucasian faces. But the GAN doesn't care if a face is from Messi or some 4th division player, so this might be the angle.
As I mentioned above, computation is also an issue, I would suggest to figure out an agreement with nvidia to use their technology in exchange for some marketing exposure. I mean they released the noise cancellation for free, so to see some of their research applied in a market might have some considerable value for them. Maybe they could even help out with some of the limitations I mentioned.
Further, the images would ne to be generated in the cloud, it is impossible to even just generate one picture on a user spec computer. The amount of VRAM those networks need is insane and mostly above 10GB.
Can I download it?
Yes, here is a zip file with 1886 images. Technically I can generate millions of them but as mentioned above, about 5% are bad.
FAQ
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Cheers
fayon
Cheers!!
bennytee
Can't thank you enough, they look great. My only gripe is that they do need cleaning up a bit if they're used on dark skin as they have white ghosting around them but its not a deal-breaker and can be done one by one as I use them.
Is there any chance you could do older ones for staff?
Thanks again
gestalt
Im working on that white ghosting stuff, but it seems like there always will be some roughness to it. A staff pack will be possible, but at first I will try to sort some other issues out.
ygeshev
bennytee
One by one, using the unique ID's of each newgen, bit of a pain but worth it
Like this
In Football Manager, go to settings > preferences > interface and select the field that says "Show sceen IDs in the Title Bar to assist skinning"
Exit back to the player you want to replace the image of and take note of the ID number.
Find the image you want to use and replace the name of the image with the ID
then use this program to create the config file
ygeshev
Mustang13297
HRiddick
We're already chatting, hopefully something will be in the works between the two projects fairly soon
Mustang13297
That's great to hear! Looking forward to it
Ms Football Manager
Thank you. You have made my game complete.
laurentius
Btw, generated.photos gives very realistic AI-created images too, and you can remove the background already at the website.
bennytee
jozza800
If you set the squad view to show only player names and the player id you can export/print to file the lists of players and they're ids. Easier than copying the ids from the player name top bar.
GfxJG
Gordonzolar
Bob de Bobber
I also might have a solution for the first problem (being able to generate a specific hair color or ethnicity). Now I don't really know how the whole StyleGAN thing works (I looked at it briefly in the past, but I found it a bit to complicated), but could you in theory just use a bunch of images of for only example blond white guys to ensure you generate a blond white guy?
If that does work and you've not done it because it's too much work to sort through face packs and select all the blond guys, then maybe a facepack like this would help? It was made back when you just replaced regen hairstyles with faces so it's fully sorted by ethnicity, hair colour and hair length.
Again, no idea if that's an option and maybe you already thought of it yourself and it's too much work with the training of StyleGAN for a bunch of different smaller image sets or something else, but it might be useful.
gestalt
Training takes the most time. Generating is moderate. The goal is to release a megapack in the end, so it could potentially be used for automatic regen replacement. Right now I am working with HRiddick to improve the cleaning of generated images.
Yes of course you could use it in that way, but at first we focus on better image quality. As said above. Automatic regen replacement is the end goal. And the ethnicity option really just works if the guys who work on the live editors would help us out here. I looked into it, but this is not really my area of informatics im into. Unfortunately none of them have answered our messages, so i dont have much hope unfortunately.
Could be done, but training the StyleGAN2 from a pretrained network takes at least 8hrs. I think we can achieve great diversity with a well designed training set. I am already using stratified sampling, so i try to balance the different ethnicities out. The odd one might just not make it, because GANs sometimes don't reproduce super small minorities. E.g lets say there is a player with blue hair and just one in FM, im pretty confident the GAN would not produce any player with blue hair. Its just an outlier.
A future version will have the generated images pre-sorted by ethnicities. This will not be 100% accurate, especially for ethnicities that look very similar (e.g African and Carribean, or East Asian and South East Asian). But it should be good enough to aid you.
P.S: If we finish improving the image quality, there will be a staff pack as well.
laurentius
gestalt
How did you do it? How accurate are your results?
laurentius
There is a Python script to do it but as far as I know it is only available as part of paid-for content. Works really well though, almost no hiccups at all. Only thing I've noticed is that English players with obviously Asian names get assigned Northern European faces. I can PM you later if you're interested in more details...
gestalt
definetly interested.
FuryG
Have you seen the new Regen Replacement Tool? Using this together with GAN faces would be amazing I believe! --> https://sortitoutsi.net/downloads/view/55026/samaroys-newgen-replacement-tool
There might still be a "manual" component if I understand correctly - sorting the generated faces into certain ethnicities (the regen replacement tool has distinct source folders named by ethnicity from which the pictures are pulled and mapped to relevant IDs). I believe this could be very well handled, especially if we combine efforts of a couple of interested helpers (would offer myself of course).
What do you think?
KnockItWide86
Samuel Roy
We have definitely been in contact around this and will be working together on something for sure!
Mortiis
JimmysTheBestCop
I tested it with your 1886 picture files I just had to replicate it to 14,256 and randomly generate there file names 1 to 14,256. I'm sure I will notice duplicate pictures since the pool was only 1886 pics replicated. But if you had 14,256 unique picture files I'm sure it would drop the chances of ever seeing duplicate pics for gens to really low.
Great stop gap until you can figure out the ethnicity/nationality/skin color thing. And it doesn't require the end user to do anything. They would just drop the folder with the 14,256 and the xml file into their graphics folder.
Mortiis
but how u get all those regens id's
and how u fast rename all those pictures to their regen id's???
JimmysTheBestCop
A free program like "bulk rename utility" to rename all the files. So I copy/paste the original 1800+ images to 14,256. Used the program to then randomize the order of the renaming and just start from 1 to n+1. Click go, basically. Takes all of 5 seconds for the program to run.
Now the 1st question I have absolutely no idea. I am assuming its part of the xml script from Willylim that he made for FM18. The xml file has over 1 million lines!!!!!!! I'm assuming each of the gen ids are those 1 million lines. Looks like it goes from 1915388583 to 1916413232
There is also another script out there that takes care of the ethnicity part. I know it was mentioned somewhere, maybe a podcast or article, but it has to do with "Chilled Moose". Her custom regen faces. I think one of her discord users created a script to map her face gen packs by nationality or ethnicity. Besides a couple of steps its basically suppose to be automatic as well. Chilled Moose stuff is paid content as she has a Patreon which among other things gives access to the scripts and discord. But as far as I heard the script wasn't created by her and so is free to be modified if one can find the script.
I came across the Willylim script because someone applied it to a free "self isolation" 50 pack that Chilled Moose gave out when Covid isolation struck. Limited effectiveness since you are replicating 50 to 14256. Many many many duplicates. But with the 1800+ its pretty dang on great. If there was a full 14256 unique pics even better. Someone posted a link to the script, somewhere on social media most likely a twitter post
https://www.mediafire.com/file/cegb7rptrh44jmh/config.xml/file
Mortiis
i will try it on the weekend and i will let you know if it worked