3D Modelling Test: MakeHuman

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I came across an Open Source tool for creating 3D characters known as 'MakeHuman'. The official website touts its mesh licenses:


" We are proud to announce that MakeHuman has switched to the most liberal license available for output content! Content created with MakeHuman is licensed under the CC0 license, giving artists unprecedented freedom for using their MakeHuman creations in any way they can imagine.

The MakeHuman team hopes that this new license will allow more projects, both commercial and non-commercial, to make use of our application. This will give anyone access to high quality human models. As a short summary, with this change the MakeHuman team explicitly waives all of its rights to the works created with MakeHuman worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighbouring rights. "

Pretty interesting. Bear in mind Autodesk Maya costs £3,795.00. As an independent developer, this is certainly something worth looking into. With the right combination of tools, a base 3D model created using this application can always be improved.


I decided to quickly investigate and determine its feasibility. The basic system specifications on the test machine were: Intel i7-3632QM at 2.2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 710M, 8GB DDR3 Memory.

After installation, it took about 3-4 seconds to launch the application:

By just playing around with a few layers and pre-sets, I was able to come up with this, in 25 minutes. That's rather quick, and quite impressive usability already working in its favour.

I also noticed there were quite a few options I hadn't delved into, and I really wasn't meant to either seeing as the purpose of the test was just to have a better idea how the application worked.

Rest assured, I will be conducting a few more experiments to see how robust this open source offering really is.


Mr O. Shonibare
Project Lead and Designer
Project Aella
InnerSanctum Games