I'm going to be checking into DAZ 3D next. It says it can export to various formats (fbx, obj, etc).

I've used blender, truespace, and MAX. all 3d modeling software is more or less the same.

Things like Daz and Poser are 3d modeling software without mesh editing and texturing. I think the idea is you buy meshes and textures from them.

The female models i have right now have awful topology in the lower face area. Too bad to try to fix - unless there's no better choice.

I've seen mention of bastioni, i should check that out too. i may end up buying assests. : (

I've used Daz3D too. Daz isn't a modeling software, like you said, but it does have some really good high quality base meshes.

Poser is another great base mesh kind of software. I haven't played with it too much tbh.

I try to avoid buying assets, mainly because it ends up not fitting in with the art style I already have.

Ok, Manuel Bationi Lab looks like it has promise:

http://www.manuelbastioni.com/manuellab.php

Mesh morphing, decent base meshes, open source. Appears to be Python scripts for Blender. I'm going to download it and check it out before i checkout Daz. Looks like Daz, Poser, Make Human, and Bastioni are about it. What about Mixamo? Hows that work? You buy the models and the animations are free? or vica versa?

Of course, what we want is something that can generate stuff like this:

This one here is from Daz...

As you can see, texturing is everything.

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-asian-woman-character/875566

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/jane-realistic-female-woman-3d-max/825210

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-latin-american-woman-character-derika/655873

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/character/woman/asian-casual-girl

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/character/woman/chinese-beauty

http://www.dreamcraftdigital.com/realistic-3d-girl/

Is there anything like this but for anime characters?

It says it has that capability, and "Also it provides a library for the anime "shojo" characters, in classic or modern style". Might use it with a toon shader.

Here's an interesting thread i found on the subject of software to make human 3d models. Nothing new I noticed. Zbrush and Mudbox - plus the "usual suspects"...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-program-for-creating-realistic-3D-models-from-imagination

Here's some Bastioni output: Blender plugin - just a 40 meg download.

Another possibility... I've noticed a lot of older high quality posed meshes on places like CG Trader and 3D archive, with human_maker in the filename. Don't know what human_maker is, but the meshes are quite nice. Unfortunately, they are posed, so not suitable for rigging. There is one high quality female base mesh out there, you can find it on most of the sites. Idle posed for rigging. High poly, high quality, but not textured. : (

What about Mixamo? Hows that work? You buy the models and the animations are free? or vica versa?

Mixamo is used only for rigging and animations. It's a website that you can upload your character models to, and after assigning anchor points, it rigs the model and applies animations to it from the large library they have. It's actually a pretty good library of animations, and the software itself is good quality. It's pretty useful in that it solves half the problem many of us solo devs have with characters.

The other half (the actual model generation), imo, there is no perfect solution to. It really just depends on what capabilities you already have, how much you're willing to pay, and what your standards are.

EDIT: I will add that ZBrush combined with Mudbox can not only make stunning characters from scratch, they can also be used to make modifications to an existing baseline mesh.

Of course, what we want is something that can generate stuff like this:

I hear animators and 3D artist across the world cry in despair. These models are so static that using them in game engine as is would be near impossible, making game ready models from these would be so much a pain that if you hired a artist to do it they would use the model as nothing more than reference.

A lot of how good these models look is because of the skin and hairs, they won't look anything near that in a game. Texturing is actually very limited, even just to achieve the eyebrows with a texture would take hours of work.

Hair tech, and skin is advancing although it's still a long time before we see this kind of look even in AAA games.

Last problem with these are animation, even retopologized meshes would inherit the bad animation trades from the models. Models like these look good when rendered as a still, some even look good in a 360 vid. However once you attempt to animate them, they just look fake.

The reason is because your normal face, is a extreme, making a face for animation involves relaxed facial features, none of the above faces are relaxed or was modeled in a relaxed pose.

Without having tried it, I think it's easier to make a convincing, usable character from Makehuman than it would be from the characters above.

Again, ScoutingNinja's on point here. None of those pics and models are game models. One of them was rendered in Arnold, which is not a game engine. They look amazing basically because they're being used for just one still render picture.

I hear animators and 3D artist across the world cry in despair.

perhaps i should re-phrase that to say "generate stuff that looks like this". I did not mean to infer that the examples are game-ready.

Without having tried it, I think it's easier to make a convincing, usable character from Makehuman than it would be from the characters above.

convincing, perhaps, useable, see no reason why not. But telegenic? Doesn't look like it when it comes to the females. And just like TV or the movies, we need telegenic "synthetic actors".

They look amazing basically because they're being used for just one still render picture.

Obviously. I'm not saying games can do this, i'm saying this is what we want games to be able to do. And we want tools that can generate content at this level of quality.

OK, I'm checking out Bastioni Labs now....

check this out...

"Base characters in Manuel Bastioni Lab 1.4.0

The base characters are the results of many years of experience in modelling humans. Each one is built on a professional mesh, that respects the fundamental requisites that every good model should have:

• The model is optimized for subdivision surface, avoiding redundant polygons and triangles.
• The topology has the loops for a perfect deformation during poses and animation, including the face loops needed for the main expression wrinkles.
• The topology permits to model the most relevant features of bodies and faces.
• The poles are structured in order to be minimal and used only where needed.
• The topology is human readable, in order to be easily customized by the artists, without headache and stress for eyes.
• The topology is designed to be optimally sculpted with Blender, Mudbox, Zbrush, etc.

All the characters include complete teeth and eye models and all them provide a real geometry eyelashes and eyebrows, in order to be exportable everywhere, without being dependent from Blender particles system.

The base characters are modelled after accurate studies of anatomy and anthropology. The proportions and face features are created using statistical data, in order to extract the average ideal character for each phenotype.

Since the base character will improve gradually in future releases, and since new base characters will be added in future ManuelLab versions, they are labelled using a naming rule that provides some extra information about them:

• The first group of letters indicates the gender: "F" stands for "Female", "M" stands for "Male".
• The second group of two letters indicates the phenotype or category: "Ca" is for "Caucasian", "As" is for "Asian" and "Af" is for "Afro" and "An" is for "Anime", "To" is for generic Toon, "Ft" is for generic "Fantasy"
• The third group of two numbers indicates a subcategory.
• The fourth group are numbers to indicate the number of revisions. In each revision the model has been subjected to some changes, in order to fix some modelling or rigging bugs.

For example F-An02.16 means a 2th type of female anime, subjected to 16 revisions.

All the base characters available in ManuelbastioniLAB are modelled by Manuel Bastioni. The models available in 1.4.0 are:

• Caucasian female
• Asian female
• Afro female
• Caucasian male
• Asian male
• Afro male
• Anime female style shojo01
• Anime female style shojo02
• Anime female style realistic
• Anime man style shojo01
• Anime man style shojo02
• Anime man style realistic
• Elf female
• Elf male
• Dwarf male

and look at this base model !

Its a blender plug-in. Just download the zip, then install from inside blender like any other zipped plug-in. Next step is to punch one up. But i want to find out how it does textures. I'm not sure yet that it generates textures for export.

Ok, looks like it generates textures...

"Save textures controls

Each time the button "Update displacement" is pressed, the system recalculates the displacement map using the values of meta parameters. This map can be saved with the "Save displacement image" button, in order to be usable in external engines or in finalized characters.

The dermal and subdermal textures can be saved too, using the dedicated buttons."

Apparently you adjust sliders or enter numeric values that morph the mesh and when you're done, you have a rigged and textured skinned mesh, ready to animate and export! JUST what i'm looking for! : )

Looks like its time to make some character models!

I hear animators and 3D artist across the world cry in despair.

perhaps i should re-phrase that to say "generate stuff that looks like this". I did not mean to infer that the examples are game-ready.

Without having tried it, I think it's easier to make a convincing, usable character from Makehuman than it would be from the characters above.

convincing, perhaps, useable, see no reason why not. But telegenic? Doesn't look like it when it comes to the females. And just like TV or the movies, we need telegenic "synthetic actors".

They look amazing basically because they're being used for just one still render picture.

Obviously. I'm not saying games can do this, i'm saying this is what we want games to be able to do. And we want tools that can generate content at this level of quality.

I see what you're saying now.

OK, I'm checking out Bastioni Labs now....

check this out...

"Base characters in Manuel Bastioni Lab 1.4.0

The base characters are the results of many years of experience in modelling humans. Each one is built on a professional mesh, that respects the fundamental requisites that every good model should have:

• The model is optimized for subdivision surface, avoiding redundant polygons and triangles.
• The topology has the loops for a perfect deformation during poses and animation, including the face loops needed for the main expression wrinkles.
• The topology permits to model the most relevant features of bodies and faces.
• The poles are structured in order to be minimal and used only where needed.
• The topology is human readable, in order to be easily customized by the artists, without headache and stress for eyes.
• The topology is designed to be optimally sculpted with Blender, Mudbox, Zbrush, etc.

All the characters include complete teeth and eye models and all them provide a real geometry eyelashes and eyebrows, in order to be exportable everywhere, without being dependent from Blender particles system.

The base characters are modelled after accurate studies of anatomy and anthropology. The proportions and face features are created using statistical data, in order to extract the average ideal character for each phenotype.

In order to be SFW, models don't include genitals.

Since the base character will improve gradually in future releases, and since new base characters will be added in future ManuelLab versions, they are labelled using a naming rule that provides some extra information about them:

• The first group of letters indicates the gender: "F" stands for "Female", "M" stands for "Male".
• The second group of two letters indicates the phenotype or category: "Ca" is for "Caucasian", "As" is for "Asian" and "Af" is for "Afro" and "An" is for "Anime", "To" is for generic Toon, "Ft" is for generic "Fantasy"
• The third group of two numbers indicates a subcategory.
• The fourth group are numbers to indicate the number of revisions. In each revision the model has been subjected to some changes, in order to fix some modelling or rigging bugs.

For example F-An02.16 means a 2th type of female anime, subjected to 16 revisions.

All the base characters available in ManuelbastioniLAB are modelled by Manuel Bastioni. The models available in 1.4.0 are:

• Caucasian female
• Asian female
• Afro female
• Caucasian male
• Asian male
• Afro male
• Anime female style shojo01
• Anime female style shojo02
• Anime female style realistic
• Anime man style shojo01
• Anime man style shojo02
• Anime man style realistic
• Elf female
• Elf male
• Dwarf male

and look at this base model !

Its a blender plug-in. Just download the zip, then install from inside blender like any other zipped plug-in. Next step is to punch one up. But i want to find out how it does textures. I'm not sure yet that it generates textures for export.

Ok, looks like it generates textures...

"Save textures controls

Each time the button "Update displacement" is pressed, the system recalculates the displacement map using the values of meta parameters. This map can be saved with the "Save displacement image" button, in order to be usable in external engines or in finalized characters.

The dermal and subdermal textures can be saved too, using the dedicated buttons."

Apparently you adjust sliders or enter numeric values that morph the mesh and when you're done, you have a rigged and textured skinned mesh, ready to animate and export! JUST what i'm looking for! : )

Looks like its time to make some character models!

That's actually great news. I'd love to be able to replace MakeHuman. Only thing is, my Blender skills are limited. I've only ever used Maya. Ah well, someday.

This pretty much sums it up (from the FAQ):

"Basically you have to think to ManuelBastioniLAB as a separate software, designed to work on one character at time, in order to create the geometry, the rigging, the texture, the clothes and then export it in your folder of characters, ready to be appended in your future final 3d scenes."

not sure if it includes clothes or not yet. But it has a feature that "rigs" clothes.

I'd love to be able to replace MakeHuman. Only thing is, my Blender skills are limited

Just looking over the docs, this thing totally blows the doors off of Make Human. i mean, just look at this...

Phenotypes

A "phenotype" define merely the physical appearance of a class of characters, it is not related to politics, culture, language and history. It's used to describe the variations of human traits in relation to the evolution in a specific geographical area.

ManuelbastioniLAB supports the most of common human phenotypes to the extent of volumetric modelling features: some important components of phenotypes, skin colour and hair features, are not implemented yet, for this reason in some cases the differences can not be so noticeable.

The phenotypes are labelled using the geographic location where each phenotype is statistically more diffused.

The available phenotypes depend by the base character selected: Afro phenotypes, Asian phenotypes and Caucasian phenotypes.

As for using it with blender, it seems you can do all the work in B-lab, then convert it into a regular blender mesh, then save and export to maya or whatever you like. You don't really have to use blender at all. The process is easy enough i could write down the steps for you. So the clothing is the only real question mark left. Other than that, this looks to be the perfect tool. Of course, the proof is in the pudding. Have to wait and see what it can generate.

and best of all,you can use the models in your games: CC-BY 4.0 license.

And all this from just one guy apparently - amazing! wonder who he is? CG artist? University Professor? Gamedev? all three? The name and some of the language in the docs suggests Italy. The software also seems to have a basis in both art and anatomy, not just anatomy. In some places it alludes to using artistic rater than anatomical algos for some things.

Seems to be a VERY well researched and high quality tool. If its close to as good as it looks, Mr Bastioni is an absolute Saint for releasing it.

Youtube video of B-Lab...