I’ve used a few so far. Blender + MakeHuman worked pretty well for some basic human skeleton models / rigging, but now I’m at a point that I need to make a non-human character. Since this game is pretty small and I only need one character I’m hesitant of spending a ton of time learning 3D modeling/rigging, but I’m not completely against it. I mostly just want to weigh my options first.
As for the character, I want him to look something like this:
If you were in my situation and had access (but little experience) to the following programs: Blender, MakeHuman, Poser, and any other free ones that I may not know of… Would you :
Sorry about that, I probably should have phrased this differently:
Would it still require a significant amount of time/experience to create a character similar to the image above that only requires basic animations (walk, run, jump)?
If I went the pay route what would you think a character like this would run for? I’ve heard figures of ~$400 for a fully rigged humanoid, but I’m not sure if something like above would be more or less than that.
I have done a fair bit of character modelling in 3ds Max and I cant imagine that a character like that one would take very long for your self to do, if you have already done things like humans, it seams like it would be a simple model.
That is a really simple design, couldn’t take more than 15-30 minutes to model. The rigging wouldn’t take that long either. It really depends on how much knowledge you have of your preferred 3d package, but I can’t imagine you needing too much given the simplicity of the character.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of experience with modeling. I’ve used MakeHuman and successfully imported it to blender, added animations using Mixamo, and then moved it to UE4. But most of that is just point-and-click.
If I plan on modeling/rigging it myself, is there a better free alternative than Blender? I also picked up Poser a while back when they were having a sale, although I hear that it’s pretty difficult to model in it, not to mention that the characters usually come out with really high poly numbers for most games.
Doesn’t look amazing, but it should work for now. The current issue I’m having is with rigging. With little-to-no experience with building a character skeleton, I just tried (and failed) at following a tutorial for doing so with Poser. Which is slightly depressing since I’ve been told that Poser is the “easy” one. Are there any other free tools out there that I could use to import a human skeleton and just modify the bones to fit my character, or should I start over with what I was attempting to do in Poser, with Blender?
Looks like you’re headed in the right direction. Keep it up. I’ve done limited work with character rigs, but I don’t know if it’s wise to adapt a human skeleton to a character like that. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you may want to make one from scratch.
My best recommendation would be to keep trying. When it comes to character creation there are two parts of the problem.
Learning your tool
Gaining Skill
There is no linear path for learning character creation. This isn’t the type of thing that you can simply “learn how to do it”. You also have to get good at it. It’s 10% knowledge 90% skill. Thankfully skill is something you can develop, you just have to put time into it.
The best motto to have is “fail faster”. You may not succeed every time you try to make a character, but I promise you’ll learn something new every time. The faster you can iterate, the faster you can accept a failure and start over. The faster you can learn from your mistakes and improve!
