Newbie Needs Human Figures

Hi,

I’m new to Blender, though I’ve had some minimal experience with other 3D programs, so I’m not completely in the dark (whew). I’m essentially a painter and a sculptor, and need to create simple human models for sculpture studies & proposals. I don’t need to animate or do anything highly advanced. Just need to model simple, nude male and female figures (no genitals necessary), and create some other simple shapes. Ideally, I could start with a basic human figure that’s already been created, and manipulate it into the shape and pose that I need. I’ve read that DAZ 3D figures can be imported into Blender, but it’s not a perfect process. Can anyone point me to a well-designed male and/or female figure that I can purchase or get for free that can be imported in Blender? I’ve looked all over without luck so far. Thanks very much!

So you need to Make a Human figure or two??

as it happens there is a project that has direct Blender Import with a fully rigged character called

MAKEHUMAN

you wouldn’t happen to know a bunch about human skin would you??

Robertltux, thanks for the info. I installed MakeHuman, then exported a basic model with rigging, then imported into Blender Worked great! Now I just need to learn how to pose the figure, i.e. move the limbs around, etc. (I will also learn how to modify all the shapes, but that will come later.) Can someone recommend a tutorial that will show me how to manipulate the skeleton/limbs and pose the character in different positions, etc? Thanks so much!

I pretty much figured out how to move the limbs! Go into “Pose” mode. Somehow, I didn’t see that before. Now I think I just need to learn how to add more detail to the figure. Exciting! (sorry, newbie, you know.) :slight_smile:

Great Tutorials: http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/blender

Post your work so other people who are looking for human figures in Blender can learn from it.

One of the cool things about Makehuman that not everyone knows is that you can use their models for anything - no credit, no fees, no restriction. If you look at Poser and DAZ’s licensing agreement you can’t do anything for free with their models except play with them like dolls (not mentioning any creepy stuff here) - and buy lots of stuff from DAZ to dress them up.

Yes, I’ve already started work on a human figure from MakeHuman. It will be extremely basic, but will upload next week!

I created a simple human form in MakeHuman. Exported it with bones (as .dae). Imported into Blender, and starting playing in edit mode. The bones show through by default from MakeHuman, but they don’t seem to show up on render. The only thing I’ll have to resolve (besides adding a lot of detail) is how to eliminate the weird wrinkles between the buttock and upper thigh. So it appears that one can create a simple human form in MakeHuman, and use that as a good starting point in Blender.[ATTACH=CONFIG]318248[/ATTACH]

Bones are only control objects and do not render. You usually want to see them in order to manipulate them. Weird creases are par for the course when posing organic meshes. In the properties editor, in the modifiers tab (wrench) in the armature modifier panel check ‘preserve volume’ to control this a little bit.

Thanks for the tip, DruBan. I’m sure I’ll be needing a lot more help before I master Blender.

Has the mesh been weight mapped or is it just using a generic bone envelope rigging? The restrictions on DAZ models is that the mesh cannot be redistributed, 2D renders and animations are fair game.

the figure is from MakeHuman, not Daz. But I’ve read an article that makes if very tedious and unfun to import from Daz to Blender. Anyway, I just did some simple ticking, “add Skeleton” I think, and exported from MakeHuman, then imported into Blender.