Tools for editing facial features/body shape

I am working on a sports game and one thing I would like to include is the ability to allow users to edit faces and body in game. So you can make someone fatter/smaller/etc or move facial features about to look how they want. The only way I can think of this working is by adding a generic head and attaching bones to the different features that allow you to manipulate them. (Pull nose higher, or eyes further apart, etc) And for the body I don't know how you could edit it without deforming the skeleton and therefore distorting animations. You could swap in different meshes, but I don't want to have too many in the game, plus it will cost more for my artist to create. See the below video for an example from Pro Evolution Soccer of the kind of facial manipulation I mean.

http://youtu.be/JfUjSp6dzL0

Also, I would like a way of creating faces from photographs. I have toyed with the idea of using software like iClone 5 (http://youtu.be/LKEQr9KncSM) to create heads from photos, but I don't know how to fit it into the workflow and the created heads would still need a fair bit of work to get into a suitable condition. The effect I am looking for again comes from PES, see below.

http://youtu.be/NuaOZWVTHLk

So is there any assets within Unity, or applications outside of Unity, that can help with this process?

 

Inside Unity I'm not sure. For the body stuff you could potentially still use bones and animations, but instead of deforming the skeleton do it as an additive pre-pass animation. However, this depends on the animation system you're using - I don't think that Mecanim supports scaling bones on Humanoids. Also it'd quite possible reduce animation performance, as you're running a whole extra animation on every character all the time.

Outside of Unity I'd suggest taking a look at MakeHuman, Mixamo and Autodesk Character Generator. I'm not sure how suitable those will be for your needs, but they're the three most major things I can think of that focus on your area without some kind of by-the-hour service.

 

You might want to look at:

UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

It is free I believe.

cheers, gryff

 

That's done with Blend Shapes. This Video does a good job explaining it.

 

@MurDocINC - That looks perfect for what I need! I obviously will need my artist to produce various mesh manipulations but actually looks much simpler than adding bones to all features. I'll definitely be looking more into this. Cheers.

@gryff - Thanks man, but not quite what I need. I am looking to manipulate my artists models not have ones created for me. But it might useful in the future. I'll keep it in mind.