EVE Online: Pulling faces
When you first enter the character creator screen, you’re confronted with a blank canvas of an avatar — relatively featureless and bereft of hair or modest clothing. While it’s tempting to start sorting through the pretty hair styles and the currently limited selection of clothing choices, these are finishing touches that are best left until later. Pay close attention to the shape of your character’s face, remembering that in this first design stage you’re seeing a very neutral expression. If you make an angry face or a squint at this stage, your character will always have it. All changes made to one side of the face are automatically propagated to the other, keeping the face neutral and symmetrical.
The key things you’ll want to modify here are the nose, jaw line, cheekbones, the position of the eyes, and the position and size of the mouth. Rotate the character around frequently to see how it looks at different angles and under different lighting conditions. Looking at it in a side-on profile is also a handy way to check whether the nose, chin and eyes look the way you want. When you’re happy with the way the face looks, move across to the complexion menu on the right-hand side and try out some of the options. Adding some aging or scarring will give your character’s skin some much-needed texture, making it look a bit more realistic and interesting. Leaving all of these options at zero can produce an odd porcelain-doll effect that robs a character’s face of a lot of personality.