MB-Lab Release for Blender 2.80

hopefullyidont1 · March 30, 2023, 6:12am

Nanoglyph:

I wouldn’t bother MB-Lab at this point - it’s only a matter of time before it breaks if it hasn’t already. MB-Lab might still work with 3.3LTS, but you can also find the Manuel Bastioni Lab characters in the CharMorph addon, which is actively developed. That’s probably the better bet since regardless if MB-Lab does work today, it’s doomed to eventually break since it’s no longer maintained.

I’m not sure I’d say the Manuel Bastioni models are the “best” for this type of character development. They’re free, I appreciate free. They look better than the other free character creator MakeHuman, but HumanGen is definitely the better Blender native character creation tool if you’re willing to pay or don’t require an open license (use caution if you choose the MB figures for the open license though, the MB figures’ AGPL licensing may not be compatible with certain use-cases, like closed source video games). HumanGen is quite reasonably priced if you compare it to buying characters individually, or to what you’d have to spend to have the same functionality in Daz or Reallusion Character Creator.

To be clear, I’m not trying to advertise a commercial product, I’m just saying if you’re asking which is best for this kind of work, well, Alexander Lashko’s character modeling and texturing skills are more professional so his models look quite a bit better, especially for non-white characters. The addon features are roughly comparable (especially given MB-Lab’s bugginess, though CharMorph is pretty stable). On the other hand, MB-Lab and CharMorph are free.

CharMorph includes a couple other figures, in addition to Manuel Bastioni’s.

Yeah MB-Lab is dead in the water, Charmorph is much better and has active developers and artists which includes me, If you want good results, I would like consulting on my own stuff, since i’m almost always available,

I’ve been working for a solution for the character creation issue for 3 years now, so i think i’m pretty experienced with what is possible. Sometimes it’s less about the cost of character creation it is about licensing, Why use a third party that you don’t have full control over when you can just make your own stuff, In a studio context, Of course meshes are now too complex for smaller projects to compete with big studios who can get professional 3d scanning for their talents and their likenesses.

In a Character creation context, you can see an imprint of what the base is in most contexts, Most metahumans look like metahumans, and this is a limitiation with designs of textures and lack of due diligence of most artists who are satisfied with the basics.

Metahuman is characterized by a very smooth and glossy look, which makes sense since the textures seem to be procedural and then baked down.

Reallusion is more orange and noisy with more detailed textures, though Character creator 4 seems much better than anything else that currently exists.

When designing Vitruvian it came from a prior experimentation with ComplexAce’s Reom. Textures are the thing that identifies where something comes from, So casting off the idea of 100% customizability allows you to focus on what can be done.

Going back on topic, MB-Lab is Free but it is a strange license that requires publication of assets,
If Manuel Bastioni chose a Creative Commons license there wouldn’t be as many people on the mb-lab discord server asking about licensing, For my money the license that Manuel Bastioni intended with AGPL is probably CC-BY-SA. GPL/AGPL is a software license it can’t be applied to creative works and the reverse is true for Creative Commons.

If you want to check out what is currently being done on the future Charmorph side, I have a thread on
BA too. The more attention, the faster I can get to a viable competitor.