MakeHuman, an open source character creation software that started life as a Blender plugin, recently released 1.2.0 Alpha 2. With Manuel Bastioni Labs recently shutting down, MakeHuman has become the primary open source character creation software. Fortunately, it is quite good and is getting better with more extensive community support. While no longer a Blender plugin, MakeHuman still tightly integrates with Blender, both via its mhx format and through a real-time communication option.
Highlights of the 1.2.0 a2 release include:
- The codebase has received a major overhaul to bring it up to date with modern versions of Python and Qt
- Third party assets can be downloaded from within MakeHuman with a simple point and click procedure
- There is a completely new Blender integration, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect
- Improved internationalization support for non-ASCII characters (backported)
- Plugins in user space
- Plugins activation at runtime
- Improved tag sorting capabilities, including sticky tag provisions
- Tags for models (with configurable tag count)
- Show Name Tags instead of file names in the file loader.
- Saving model as target
- Real weight estimation
- Configurable location for the home folder
- MHX2 is bundled in the default installation
- There is a new installer for windows
- There is a new PPA for ubuntu. This PPA also offers builds of plugins.
- Using Jupyter for the shell utility, if available on the system (currently not working for MakeHuman windows builds)
You can download the installer for Windows here while a Linux PPA is available here. If you want to learn more about MakeHuman, be sure to check out the video embedded below.