MakeHuman started life in 1999 as a Blender plugin named MakeHead, a plugin for procedurally creating head meshes. In 2000 the first version of MakeHuman was released. In 2005 it was turned into a stand alone application. Today we seem a major milestone release of MakeHuman 1.0.0!

So what exactly is MakeHuman? It’s an application for generating human models. Most impressively it generates very clean, fully rigged, quad only, Mudbox/zBrush ready models using 1170 controllable morph targets. If you’ve ever played a video game that allowed you to fully customize your character, you have an idea what MakeHuman provides. The major difference is MakeHuman generates a model ready for use in major 3D applications. In many ways it is very similar to the application Poser.

Oh yeah, did I also mention it was completely free and open source?

Now for a couple key links.

You can download MakeHuman here.

The source code is available here.

You can access the current buglist here.

The 1.0.0 press release is available here (and repeated below).

So why should you as a game developer care?

Well first of all, it is about one of the easiest ways to create game ready human assets. Speaking of game ready, you also have the ability to create game appropriate rigs:

Perhaps most importantly, the resulting mesh is both clean and relatively low polygon ( unless of course you choose the smooth option ). Here is an exported mesh opened in Blender:

All told its about 24K quads as currently configured. The mesh is and ampature are both logically laid out (with clothing all as separate meshes) and ready for use:

If you need a human model for your game, you really have nothing to lose checking out MakeHuman.

Press release:

Art News