Make Human, or MakeHuman, is software to assist with creating human characters for animation in software like Blender or Unity. It is incredibly powerful, intuitive and easy to use. The MakeHuman Community have done an outstanding job with this open source software.
Using MakeHuman to create a human character is not very different from personalising a character in a game like Ark or GTA. You simply manipulate sliders to achieve the look you are after, I am not sure it could be any easier. The software is also incredibly powerful in the multiple ways in which a character can be manipulated and personalised. With enough practice anyone should be able to create a likeness resembling almost any real world personality.
If you are interested in modelling the human form this software is certainly worth having a look at. Not only will it produce a useable mesh for you to tweak further in Blender, it also has plugins for Blender and will rig your character with the bone system you select.
I will be looking at the software in more detail in future blog posts, for now lets look at where to download the software.
MakeHuman is available for free download via the MakeHuman Community website. At the time of writing the stable release is version 1.2.0, however older versions are available as well as nightly builds and Alphas. I downloaded and have been using version 1.2.0 so this is the version I will be talking about and the version I would suggest you also download if you are interested in testing the software.
The software is offered for Windows, Linux and MacOS. I will be covering the Windows version as I am on a Windows machine. Install is not unlike any other software you may have installed, double click the executable (.exe file) and follow the instructions.
While you can choose the installation path for MakeHuman it did in my instance use C drive as the default for data files. This has a surprisingly simple work around if you would like to keep you OS drive clear of such data files as I do.
All you need to do is open a text file, windows notepad. and type in the drive where you would like MakeHuman to store and read data from. I use my E drive. So into notepad I typed
E:\
If you want to use another drive you just replace E with the corresponding letter assigned to that drive. You then save as
makehuman.conf
This is a config file that will tell MakeHuman to use the stipulated drive to store and read data from.
You then place this config file in your Local AppData folder. You should find you AppData folder on your OS drive. My file path looks like this -
This PC > Local Disc(C:) > Users > Name > AppData > Local
Really simple solution to a minor announce for people like me who like to keep their main drive as clean as possible.
In the next post I will look at the MakeHuman user interface and the basic sliders, with images, for creating a human character.
Being this is free software don't be shy about throwing the crew some support over at their Patreon page.
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