Individualizing your generator faces

Never be ashamed to use the default generator as base for your sprites. With custom parts from packs, made by yourself or people on the forums you can expand on it as you wish, but generally people seem to underestimate this tool, with the results usually looking very young and uniform as being the main complaints I’ve seen so far.
Let’s have a look at the complaint of the characters looking too young, even for young adults:
This lad is supposed to be the hunter in my random tutorial party and as you can see, even with the smaller eyes and the pointy nose, he looks pretty young.

That is in fact due to the proportions of his face.

If we “complete” the head shape and have a closer look we find that the eyes and ears sit very low on the skull, which is a feature that is very prominent in - you guessed it - children.
Now MZ comes with this handy feature which is called “Offset” that does what its name suggests - it allows you to offset the parts in comparison to their original position.

To make this or any other guy look more grown up, we generally need to move up the eyes and ears and everything that makes their new position look off.

So just by some careful offset placements the same character made with the exact same parts already looks a lot older and serious than before. This will not change the drawing style of course, so your result will always be cute and anime-ish, but in terms of seriousness, those little tweaks will help you a lot!

So if we take some more examples, here is how much those changes can affect your average party.
Before


After


And a gif for easier comparison

As you can see, those tiny offsets already do a lot on the appearance of the characters, they look more mature and less “off”.

And about the “off” part, there is even more to do, if you are ready for some picture editing.
No worries, this is not too difficult and it will help improve the generated faces a lot!

1. Fixing the not matching stuff

If we look at the heroine on the left, we can see that even with the offset, her headpiece and hair still not goes perfectly well together, and the more we zoom in, the more issues we can find:

Her headpiece seems to be incomplete in one location, weirdly is over the hair in another and her hair also is in front of her collar which looks a little odd. That is a side effect of being able to mix and match the parts in the generator, sometimes little things don’t add up, but that is the pill we have to swallow to get the variation the generator provides.
We could now go straight in and redraw that, but why? We actually have those parts and the generator with the settings ready at hand!

In this case, we need the hair without the headpiece and the collar without the hair, and we can simply “deselect” them and export the faces for that setting.

Now we can open them all in Gimp and then use layer masks to select the parts we need from those two new layers.
For the gap, we can add a new layer behind and draw in the missing part with just a little black color.

In this type of edits we will usually never have to actually draw new things, just assemble the parts we already have and add in little lines/extras.

1. Reshading

This might sound huge, but hear me out!
Due to the generator being as versatile as possible, it cannot provide a proper light situation as if it was drawn, as what casts a shadow on what is totally depending on the picked parts.

If we compare the heroine we are working on with the default heroine, we can already see some of that. The highlight on her eyes and lips are in a different spot, her overall shading seems a lot more flat. The drawn one also has a bright light on her right cheek and a light line on her left side.

The easiest fix to get the same light situation is pretty obvious:

By simply flipping the image they now share the same light source. You have to decide whether you want a consistent light on your faces or the same angle.
Another possibility would be reshading the generator face, but that would basically lead to massive edits and a lot of redrawing. Technically it is possible, but if you can do that in a reasonable time, you might just draw your own custom faces anyways. But even if I don’t do the reshading, I like to mirror the reflection on the eyes and move the ones on the lips so at least they match the ones of the default characters. But that is totally optional!
One thing you might want to draw in are some shadows where several different parts overlap.
With just some extra solid color at the rim where a part on an upper layer overlaps one on the lower layer, you can make a huge difference:

One last thing you can do to better blend in with the default graphics for sure is left:

Have you ever wondered why Gimp has such an issue with the default graphics? That is due to them having their transparency handled via a layer mask while they are indexed, a mode that usually does not allow semi-transparency. A way around getting them opened properly in Gimp by the way is opening them for example in Paint.net first and saving them there (Gimp is more powerful, it just can’t do that trick) to reopen them in Gimp.

But, what I want to say here is: the default faces look a little crispy cause of those indexed colors, and we can replicate that for our face!
With a right click on our layer (it should be one by now) we create a layer mask with the option you see selected in the shot below:

Then we go to image - mode - indexed:

Here we could have left the default 255 colors, but since the default faces have eight faces share the same 255 colors, you can go below that for your single face.
If you want to avoid that weird issue you see above, you can right now switch the mode back to RGB, the look will stay the same!

Here you can see the difference, especially the shading on the helmet now is a lot more crisp!

And here is a final before and after of this character!

Dude, this is the tutorial I have been waiting for!!! The face images (and eventually the portaits i want to do) have been daunting xD. Thank you for this @Avery !!

This is an excellent tutorial. The emphasis you put on the shading alone makes it all worthwhile, as that is one of my pet gripes about generator faces. Helping those people who want it to have a party that doesn't look like it's been snatched from a kindergarten will, I'm sure, help them have a party which fits in with their story.

I think the most important part is that you can just export the face multiple times with certain parts deselected to kinda manually easily fix layering.
You could technically just build it it with the generator parts in a graphic program, but then the colors would not line up with what the generator produced.

Ah screw that, the most important part is to show that everyone can do it. Editing graphics can be pretty intimidating, but broken down this is a very beginner friendly process that can have a huge impact on the look of your game!