I'm working on an open-source space trader game.  It takes place in a large procedurally generated universe, and I'd love to have lots of procedurally generated characters to interact with.

That got me thinking: what if we made a modular portrait system?  It could be based on something like <a href="https://opengameart.org/content/template-portait-half-body">this</a>, and just have lots of interchangeable parts for hair, jewelry, facial hair, scars, tattoos, etc.  The skin and hair layers could be provided in light grayscale so that they could be tinted any color (people using an engine that can't easily tint them at runtime could just pre-tint them in their image editing software ahead of time).

With only a relatively small number of different options to mix & match, you can get a huge number of unique characters (yay combinatorics!).  And it might be a fun way for lots of people to contribute -- if all my art skills are up to is making a simple pair of earrings, well, at least I can do that.

Anybody else think this is a good idea?