Make Human

Make human is an open source application to generate characters.
Because this is a standalone program, the user interface works faster than if it was an addon in Blender.

https://youtu.be/NHWSfNbJ6kc

Why use software to generate characters?

You might think why we want to use a program that generates a character. Why not modeling it yourself? What I think is, that there are situations that you don’t have time to build everything from scratch. Modeling your own character is better but it will take ages to finish your project.

For example what if your customer is a school and asking you to make an animation with some characters within a week. Or you want to make a concept very quick. There can be several reasons you want to use software like Make Human, or MB-Lab. Another idea is to use these characters as base-mesh. And if you don’t like it or it’s not suitable for your project you can ofcourse model your character from scratch.

I heard people saying never to use software like this because you won’t learn anything from it. But what if you are not into character modeling and you need to have some characters for your project.

Cause you can use Blender to model, sculpt, render, animate, video-editing, physics, there are so many areas you can specialize on. It’s probably impossible to be specialized in all area’s. So I think that software like Makehuman can be an option, depending on the situation.

Make Human and EV Express – Perfect combination

Here I use Make Human in combination with EV Express. EV express is most productive when using the EEVEE render in Blender. It saves a lot of time setting up your scene because in EEVEE there are loads of settings like Screen Space reflections, Indirect lighting, shadows for lights, contact shadows and other render settings. E.V. Express provides also two light rigs. Each light is accessible in one addon, together with camera settings, render settings, smoke and color management. And the EV Express provides also compositing nodes, a global shader and keying sets for animation.

So Make Human and EV Express seems to be a good combination in case you need fast production.

A few Tips using Make Human and Blender 2.8x

In Make Human, don’t forget to add a skeleton and skin. If you don’t assign a skeleton, you cannot rig the character in Blender right away.
In the community tab there is an option to wait for connections. This way, Blender can make a connection with the build in server in Make Human. So you don’t need to save and load any files. Just import by making a connection via HTTP.
In the Make Human addon in Blender, all you have to do is Import Character and add IK to the bones. The rest, like Kinect, IK for the hands, etc is not working 100%. At the moment you are best of by importing the character and add IK to the armature. Probably we have to wait for the next release(s) for more.
The textures are often to bright. Therefore, in the compositor, add a Hue – Saturation – Value node. Lower the value. This is safer than using contrast and/or brightness.

Where to download Make Human?

Look at the bottom of the page on the Make Human Community Wiki. There is a download for Alpha 3. Follow the instructions there and check also the Make Human Community Main Page. You will get the software (application) and the addon.

Best is to check their pages for the latest updates.