The MakeHuman Modelling Main Subtab

 

The modelling main subtab is where the MakeHuman software opens by default. You will notice on the left of the workspace a menu is available with sliders for altering the topology of the base character mesh. The sliders available are for Gender, Age, Muscle, Weight, Height, Proportions and three sliders which work in collaboration with each other to determine overall ethnicity. These are the African, Asian and Caucasian sliders.

Body Mesh Sliders

Gender

The gender slider will alter your base mesh or topology to be either male or female dominant. With the slider to the extreme left you have a completely female character and to the extreme right a completely male character. In the default position your character is gender neutral. The dominance of one gender over the other changes dependant on the location of the indicator on the slider.

Age

The age slider will assist you in determining the age of the character you are creating. On the extreme left you have an age of 1 year and to the extreme right an age of 90 years. Moving this slider around you can see how the age of your character alters the mesh. 

Muscle

The muscle slider alters the muscle mass of the character you are creating. At the far left your mesh will have no muscle mass and on the far right will have the base shape for extreme muscle mass.

Weight

The weight slider adds overall mass to your character. At the left side of the slider the mass of your character is very low and on the right extremely high. 

Height

The height slider modifies your characters height. On the extreme left the height of your character will be 99.57 cm and to the far right 195.84 cm.

Proportions

The proportions slider alters the way the mass of your character is distributed. On the left side of the scale the mass of your character is low on the body to the right mass is moved higher up into the chest shoulder area of the mesh. 

These sliders all work in collaboration with each other, spend some time playing with the extremes of the sliders to get a feel for just how much control you have over the topology or base mesh at this early stage of modelling. Doing this will help you to better understand how each slider impacts on the others.

The Ethnicity Sliders

The ethnicity sliders, African, Asian and Caucasian are dependant on each other. Increasing the dominance of one will lower the dominance of the others. You can not have all three of these sliders, or even two, at full dominance. Spend some time altering these sliders noticing how they alter the appearance of the base mesh. 

You may notice changes to the tone of the mesh, the skin of your character can be refined latter, this does not represent the final look of the skin texture.

Info Menu

At the bottom of the screen you will notice some information about your mesh. This data changes as you alter the location of  the sliders

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This data can assist you in making decisions about where to place some of the sliders, you may know the height or age of the character you want to create. Thus you would position the Age and height sliders until those data points matched what you were trying to achieve. The other three indicators will help you to understand and track how the scale of changes you are making to your model. The ore you use the software the more these data points can aid you in creating your character.