Character Creation a la Skyrim/Fallout3/Guild Wars 2

Well, for starters you need 3 programmers, 3 artists and a QA department working full-time over a certain amount of months/years

But I'm sure you aren't actually asking about their specific systems, but rather, how would one do such a thing?

It's unfortunately one of those things you know how to do, if you have the experience in game programming.

It's a classic - if you have to ask, the answer is no -question

The specifics are this:

You start out with a base model, and you replace each parts of the body with something that "fits" together like a puzzle - or wang tiles

I'm sure there are equivalent terms when it comes to mending meshes together, which i'm not familiar with..

The simpler approach is the one where ie. the neck goes all the way down into the body, so there's no mending needed, and you'd do the same thing with shoes, arms, coats, etc.

There is of course no magical generator for such a thing

As the gentleman under here pointed out, there is an API that generates this

I'm of course wondering if you'd still need to have high end assets, or if there are "other solutions"

You could always buy the assets necessary.. But it's probably not cheap

It does seem like it's only a face generator though, so it's not the complete package you asked for?

I googled:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~ladislav/papers/pbc-i3d09/pbc-i3d09.pdf

http://graphics.cs.uh.edu/ble/papers/2013s-dwc/2013_S_DWC_preprint.pdf

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~pmerrell/thesis.pdf

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~thormae/paper/EG12.pdf

and so on

and so on

I'm sure this has been asked before but unfortunately I'm unable to find any results on Google, so hopefully you won't mind me asking again...

I was wondering, what would one need to create a character creator a la Guild Wars 2/Skyrim? Basically, decide on some characteristics, and have the character model magically generated by the code.

I'm sure some models are used to calculate each different bit but I could use some tips on how I might achieve this, as I have absolutely no idea how I could do the same.

Any Language/API will do, as long as I have an idea on how to do it. Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you for your time.

http://www.facegen.com/sdk.htm

That is the middleware used by skyrim, fallout3 and a whole bunch of other games. (Writing your own system for it is not trivial)

There is also MakeHuman. Last time I looked at it there were some licensing issues but from briefly glancing over the project homepage it looks like they managed to resolve that. Still, for every serious project you should verify that yourself.

Edit: After checking the page again I'm no longer entirely sure if you can embed MakeHuman in your own application or not. I remember reading something about that, but I'm not certain now if that was a plan for the future or something you can already do without much hassle.