Creating Unique Identity (Comprehensive Blender)

Comprehensive Blender

The comprehensive mode (a.k.a Digital DNA Blender) allows you to create a Digital Person identity by simply blending the facial features of a collection of scanned data from actual people from different ethnicities and geographies. This is a fun tool to create a Digital Person that reflects your brand and use case.

The Digital DNA Blender tool can be accessed from the Digital DNA Studio dashboard under New Custom DP > Comprehensive. This opens the Digital DNA Blender tool and shows the face of Feminine 1 set to 100%.

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Accessing the Digital DNA Blender

Using Digital DNA Blender

Digital DNA Blender is a powerful modeling tool that makes it easy to create, transform, and edit a digital person by simply blending various options available in the tool.

1. Icons to choose the face, eyes, nose, mouth, head shape, hairstyle, skin color and texture, clothing, and background

2. Features to allow the blending of different masculine and feminine facial features

3. Slider allows you to pick a numeric value by dragging the slider along a horizontal line

4. Percentage or weight of features in the blend

5. Digital DNA Blender is not real-time, so after any change to the settings, click Apply Changes to view the changes on the Digital Person

6. Finalize takes you to the publishing page of your newly created Digital Person to Digital DNA project creation screen

7. Exit takes you back to the dashboard

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Working with Digital DNA Blender

Guidelines

• If you start the blender and have all phenotypes set to 0, the system will show an average of all the phenotypes and display a blended face.

• If you set any one phenotype to a number above 0 (and rest to 0) then it automatically becomes 100% of that phenotype.

• If you set multiple phenotypes to above 0 then it'll blend it according to the values you set so you won't get 100% of any phenotype.

• Use the collect Digital DNA functionality to save/load a particular blend or use it as a starting point to create new Digital People. The Digital DNA can also be shared with colleagues working on Digital DNA Blender.

• Hovering over an image will give you a text description of that feature if you want to note it down or pass it on to a colleague

Best Practices

1. For the overall blend, aim for around 3-5 features (sliders) to be involved in your blend. Set one to be dominant.

2. For regional blending, you can push this number higher. 5-7 features (sliders) can be used to get the desired shape, but use them in small or differing amounts

3. Setting 5 sliders to 100% will just average all of them out, so try to weight the sliders where some are dominant

4. Some shapes/features (sliders) are more masculine, some are more feminine. For regions like eyes, nose, and to a lesser extent mouth, this gender difference is less noticeable. However, for regions that can dramatically change the bone structure (Overall Blend &  Skull shape), this gender difference can be quite noticeable.

How do I get started?

1. Start with the aspects of the appearance that are dominant and have the biggest impact on the person’s appearance - skin texture, hairstyle, and in certain circumstances clothing and background color.

2. Next, work on bone structure - the face icon (Overall face) and the head icon (Skull shape). 

3. Next, work on the mouth shape - this can be influenced by the Skull shape so you may need to go back and adjust your skull shape slightly

4. Next, work on the nose shape

5. Lastly, work on the eyes. The eyes are where you will likely spend a lot of your time and can have a huge impact on the final result.

Overall Face

The below table shows a preview of the characteristics of each phenotype set to 100% with a random choice of skin texture and hairstyle. This might help choose the characteristics (such as the face, eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape) of each phenotype into your unique Digital Person.

Eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape

There are indicative images for the eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape sliders. This makes it easier to decide what kind of features you want in your Digital Person. 

Hairstyle and Color

One of the most significant factors when choosing hairstyle and colors is the shade of the Digital Person’s skin type. The correct color will complement the skin and make it appear even more beautiful. You can choose from at least seven different colors for each hairstyle.

Skin Type

A variety of skin tones and textures are available for the Digital People. Tone refers to the amount of melanin or pigment in the skin, while texture refers to the condition of the skin’s surface. The masculine skin type usually has facial hair.

In addition, you can adjust the brightness and the matte level of the skin to make the Digital Person look more realistic. Lower the Matte slider to increase the glossiness of the skin. By default, these two options are set to 50%.

Makeup

Digital People are created with a natural look. To enhance the appearance, you can use the makeup options Entertainment, Professional, and Retail with varied intensity based on the use case.

Body and Clothing

• Body type - the masculine or feminine body option slightly changes the neck and shoulder mass to match the gender of the Digital Person

• Outfits - our clothing options include polo shirts, t-shirts, full sleeve formal shirts, scrubs, blazers and sweaters.

• Outfit color - we offer a wide range of pre-curated colors and textures for each of the outfit types.

• Custom Clothing - Using the Photoshop template, you can add clothing patterns, shirt colors, and company logos to create an original, on-brand shirt. You can override the shirt color by uploading the custom clothing texture you created.
  
  

Background

Part of creating a custom Digital Person involves choosing a background color or image. Consider how your brand colors will incorporate across the appearance of your Digital Person and the UI colors. The Comprehensive Blender currently supports RGB, HSL, and HEX.

Uploading a background image for your Digital People allows you to further customize the environment in which your digital creations exist, providing a more immersive and personalized experience.

To create a custom background, download the linked Photoshop template file which will demonstrate the safe areas as it pertains to content and camera cuts.

The custom background image feature is hard-coded to only accept images of these sizes (H x W):

• 1024 x 2048px

• 2048 x 4096px

• 4096 x 8192px

Additionally, the image needs to be below 20MB.

Portrait Backgrounds:

To achieve a "portrait" look, the workflow is to create an 8K canvas in Photoshop or similar, then centre a portrait image in the centre of that canvas. Put a solid colour on the borders, like so:

You will need to configure your CustomUI viewport size to match the max-height which in the image above is 4096px. The width can be anything up to 8192, but to avoid showing the black borders should be the same as the 'image' part of the background, which in the example is 2922px.

Accessories

• Name Badge - To further customize a shirt, you can add name tags in addition to the clothing patterns, shirt colors, and company logos. 

Editing Digital People

There is no straight forward way to edit the features of the Digital Person thats already been published. However, the Collect Digital DNA option allows you to encapsulate all the Blender settings that created that specific look and use it as a starting point for iterations. You can also send DNA to other Digital DNA Studio users so they can recreate the same look.

Collecting DNA from Digital DNA Studio

If you would like to use one of the Digital Persons after it is published in Digital DNA Studio as a starting point:

1. Navigate to Digital DNA Studio > New Project (or Edit an existing project).

2. Click on the 3 dots within the profile picture and select Collect Digital DNA. This gives you the Digital DNA. Copy the DNA and save it in your preferred text editor.

3. To continue working on the Digital Person, go to the Dashboard > New Custom DP > Comprehensive. Then use the Loading Digital DNA feature of the Digital DNA Blender.

Collecting DNA from Blender

The Digital DNA can be collected at any time during the creation of the custom Digital Person by clicking the 3 dots on the right side of the page. Collect Digital DNA gives you the unique blend of the Digital person in an encoded format. Copy the DNA and save it in your preferred text editor. You can use this DNA to start a new Digital Person or to continue working on it later.

Loading Digital DNA

To load the Digital DNA of a Digital Person, simply paste the Digital DNA saved earlier and click Load. Now that the unique Digital Person is loaded, you can continue fine-tuning its appearance.

Publishing

When you are satisfied with your custom Digital person, make sure you have noted the blends and options on each tab before you publish.

1. Click Finalize at the top right-hand corner to get to the publish screen.

2. Enter a Name for the custom Digital Person.
When naming your Digital Person, take into account the Digital Person identity and the sound/mood of the name. Other factors for determining a name could include an existing company mascot, role model, or personality.

3. Click Publish.
Note that the building process takes around 30 to 40 minutes, you will receive an email notification once completed. The custom Digital Person will be available in the Digital DNA studio to be used in any project within the organization.

Limitations

• Changes made to the options do not apply dynamically unless you click the Apply Changes button

• Cannot pause the movement of the Digital person on the screen

• Cannot move or zoom into the Digital person

• Cannot undo a previous change

FAQs

How do I create great-looking Digital People?

Please watch our tutorial here.

I want to create an older/younger looking Digital Person, how do I do that?

On the facial structure: Children have larger eyes and larger skulls compared to adults whose eyes and skulls are smaller.

On the skin: Look for more defined wrinkles under the eyes (eyebags), around the mouth, and any permanent facial wrinkles that appear on a neutral face to indicate age. Youthful skin has a lot more elasticity and is unlikely to retain wrinkles when neutral.

I want to recreate a preset from the Simple mode in the Comprehensive Blender, how do I do that?

The Digital DNA Bank contains the Digital DNA for the Presets and also some cool-looking crowdsourced Digital People.

How do I share my custom Digital Person with a colleague?

Use the Digital DNA feature to collect and share the Blender settings with your colleague. They can then further enhance the look of the Digital Person by loading the DNA into the Blender tool.

Can I delete a custom Digital Person after I’ve made it?

Not yet, this feature is coming soon.

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