Characters are always key when designing a game, and if you don’t have modeling skills, you can always turn to a tool that lets you build it as if it were a character development from The Sims and the 3d character modeling guide.
As a rule, such tools allow you to change facial features, clothing, and more, by clicking and changing some parameters.
There are many tools available to assist in this process. Many of them are designed in such a way that these symbols are used as backgrounds or others.
Autodesk Symbol Generator
When it comes to creating characters for the background of our game, or that don’t require a lot of detail, we have Autodesk’s character creation program. This allows you to create characters with a small number of polygons. Which makes it great for non-interactive characters and others.
It has different rigging methods, even one for Unity 3D. This makes things a lot easier if you want to add animation to it. One of its drawbacks is the size of the textures and the details they have, but for a web tool, it works pretty well. Some things are locked as well, and you need to buy a premium account, but there is a lot that we keep in mind.
Make human
Make Human is a free software tool for detailed character creation. It has a wide range of options and allows you to change the characteristics of the face, body and clothes in more detail than the previous one. It also allows you to render your character in order to have a more detailed idea of how he will look with materials and with the right lighting.
One of the mistakes of Make Human is that when adding clothes, it can go through certain parts of the body, which might not be a problem if we align them correctly. Or we can export to our favorite 3D platform and make changes there. It works with all popular operating systems, Linux, Windows and OSX. And it is available in 32 and 64 bit versions.
DAZ studio
DAZ Studio is an interesting tool for character creation. What’s most striking is its animation system. Even though you have quite a few things to load, you can achieve great detail with it. It has a lot of sliders that allow you to customize many of the details of your character. You can even add your own content and what you have already done. Most people using DAZ Studio create 3D scenes. And it allows you to quickly visualize certain parts of your character to see what it looks like.
He has his own store where you can buy characters, clothes, shaders, and more. And you can also import your characters with full rigging, i.e. face and body.
CC Fuse
After Adobe bought Mixamo, they took Fuse and uploaded it to CC, updating its features.
It has fewer sliders than Daz Studio, but that doesn’t make it worse. Its greatest strength is texture detail. You can change quite a few things, such as freckles, the thickness of the veins, the number of moles, and others. This is all due to the fact that textures are created using Substance Designer. Unfortunately, there is no way to export them with these textures in order to change them in the graphics engine.
It also generates all possible texture output, thus producing some really cool stuff that we will be working with in our graphics engine. Once you’ve created your character, you can save it to your Mixamo account so that it auto-configures online and downloads animations for it for free.
IClone Character Creator
The Character Creator for iClone can blow the minds of many people when it comes to character creation. Its interface is similar to that of Daz Studio. Among its best advantages is the automatic age system, with which you can increase the age of the character, and some parameters and textures will be changed. Add tattoos, skin burns, and more. It has a pretty interesting clothing system and it is a layered clothing system, the polygons under your character’s clothing may or may not be removed. Thus, you can change it in the graphics engine you are using.
It also allows you to add decals of all kinds and directly animate your character, and if you have a kinect, plug it in and record the animation you make. Allow import to iClone (if you have one) to add animation. Characters always control both face and body. Which allows you to place them directly in the program in which you intend to use them.
Conclusion
All of these character creation programs are good and interesting. Which one to choose is up to you based on your ideas and needs.
