Hi, In many papers about facial rendering these lucky guys used some pretty expensive 3D scanners to create high resolution meshes with millions of polygons and details down to the mesostructure of the skin. Does anyone of you know if at least one of these very detailed meshes of real people had been made public for normal people to play around with it? Not to use it commercially in any way, but only to work, test and play with it? only one? :) thank you very much :)

With applications such as ZBrush and Mudbox it seems that high-res 3d scanning would be an unnecessary expense for game development. I can understand this application for movies where its required that the 3d model actually look like the actor, but for games I think it's above and beyond what you would need, at least until technology drastically improves. I'm assuming you want these high-res models for normal maps, right?

I would disagree with WorldPlanter's statement - to make a really good 3d model of a head takes days, and artists arn't cheap. You don't need that many heads in your project before its cheaper to buy an entire head scanner rather than pay for the artists, there workstations and office space. You could also rent one.

I have one at my uni - a Cyberware Head & Face Colour Scanner, tis great fun to play with and as you may expect, I have such a model of my own head. People might look a bit strange if I asked permission to give out 3d models of there heads for free on the internet though. And you really don't want to look too closely at my head;-)

Anyway, if you goto http://www.cyberware.com/products/index.html they have sample files that you can download. There are several formats suplied but I would go for the compressed .ply files - thats there primary format, and blender 3d will open them once you have run gzip over them.

Have fun!