Character Creation Tools for Gamedev

Development Character & Animation
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What Character Creation Application do you use for developing a game in Unreal Engine and for what reason?

I’m using MakeHuman, because it has a good rig, that gives you much control over many bones for doing a broad range of poses/animations.

It has a fast workflow: MakeHuman–>Blender–>UE4 and often only Blender–>UE4, if you have set up everything already.

You can make crowds of people, because skin texture size is “only” 2048x2048 and vertex count ~34.000 vertices.

There is one single skin texture: This is good for tattoo placement (less seams).

You can create every age group from toddler to old people.

If you want more detail (aged skin), than it’s just a matter of seconds to create a normal map in paint.net from the corresponding skin texture…

The Characters are anatomically correct unlike with the other Character Creators, where you only get ken & barbie :-).

I’ve tested several other Character Creation Applications, but they aren’t necessarily better, maybe the faces are more unique, but much depends on the skin texture you use…

I’ve uploaded some example images of how MakeHuman Characters look like in Unreal Engine (the female characters use a small bone weight blender-mod from the MakeHuman site you have to apply directly in blender (for smoothing out some edges that otherwise would look less smooth from specific angles…).

The male faces were mostly made with the random generator :slight_smile:

Can you upload some (no photoshop, no render) screenshots of average looking humans from within your project/game, you have made with your favourite Character Creation application? (MakeHuman,IClone CC2,DAZ Studio,ManuelBastioniLab…)
Simply for getting an impression on how the different tools compare, because you can mostly find only renders or photoshopped images, but only a few “raw” screenshots…

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As luck would have it our group, Frozensand, is doing “behind the scene”, type video blogs as to our conversion of Urban Terror from the much older game engine, idtech3, to Unreal 4 and having access to that engine on the same day as everyone else and after an extensive audit decided to go with the Genesis 3 framework as to “our” character development pipeline.

As to our reasons as to available options I cover “some” of the reasons we elected to go with this route.

Sorry for being wordy but there is a lot of different reasons over and above having a single character in game.

Keep in mind that Genesis 3 is not a turnkey solution but rather a framework as to what is required as to the parts that makes up a character.

Some renders and examples of the G3 base mesh in UE4

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Daz Chars look impressive, but they lack a good armature. There are simply too few bones for making advanced poses/animations (have tested it with blender today). You can’t make gym,yoga
poses like the crossed legs seat etc. It’s only possible inside of Daz Studio, but not in blender/UE4. It seems that only MakeHuman Characters have the most advanced rig (even Character Creator 2 Characters appear to produce odd looking results in blender with more unusual poses).

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Does Make Human have facial rigs? The characters in OP lack facial expressions.
For humans I use Autodesk Character Generator since it has decent customization and good facial rig, but I take the characters from there to Maya where I make adjustments, clothes etc. and from there to Substance Painter for clothing textures. The usage of Autodesk generator is 5 dollars per character with facial rig though, low quality models without face rig are free.

5

MakeHuman has bones for the facial expressions: You only need to change the rotation mode of the bone(s) concerned from Quaternion to Axis Angle and you can thus freely rotate it. For changing the mode, only one bone at a time must be selected and then you can animate the whole face…

But I’ve found an interesting script for DAZ-Blender workflow as well, which allows you to pose/animate DAZ characters in Blender with the bodies deforming properly. It’s called “diffeomorphic”. But it doesn’t seem to be meant for exporting into Unreal Engine.