Evolving Characters

The art of creating characters is getting to be less of an art and more a matter of levers - at least when it comes to getting to a stock character you can work with.

There are several options for creation characters, including Mixamo's Fuse, Autodesk's Character Generator, and the open-source Make Human. All have some kind of free option, and all make it easy to create fully rigged characters that can be imported into 3D modeling and animation products for further editing.

Autodesk has been working on its technology, which was acquired with Evolver in 2011. It's been living in the labs as Project Pinocchio in a long beta state, but now it has graduated and is available as a cloud-based product called Character Generator. The tool has undergone a significant user interface change during its time under Autodesk. While the content does not look much different than it had in its Evolver days, it has a more robust and efficient backend that can deliver the final character in just a few minutes.

Creating a character is a simple matter in Character Generator, and although those playing with the free version cannot download characters created with the artistic options as used above, they can play around quite a bit. (Source: JPR)

Character Generator

Autodesk is making Character Generator available to subscribers of all versions of the Entertainment Creation Suite, as well as Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, MotionBuilder, Mudbox, and Maya LT. Its also available with some rental packages including Max, Maya, and Maya LT. For those who want to try it out, Autodesk also has a free, limited version available. It requires registration for a free Autodesk account.

The software lets you combine characteristics from basic character types to create a new character. Its fun, if not completely gratifying. This is done through an online site, so there is a certain amount of lag; not every action results in a predictable reaction, meaning theres not a lot of fine control. Still, its a simple matter to get a character created in a few minutes. Character Generator also lets you download the rigged character as an FBX file, which can be used in other programs, or a Maya binary .mb file, along with a texture map.

If youre a full subscriber, you can choose a resolution from crowd, low, medium, and high. You can add a facial rig. And, depending on the options chosen, youll be charged the appropriate number of cloud credits. A high-resolution character is five cloud credits for subscribers and free for students and educators. In the US, credits cost a dollar and are sold in packs of $100. Subscribers get 100 credits free.

The free option limits resolution, doesnt allow facial rigs, and limits downloadable body types to human, although you can play with the Gorn or Bulk styles to create more cartoonish characters using the Artistic option.

The characters can be used with Autodesks products, of course, and there's direct support for Maya and MotionBuilder. But as you might expect, a certain amount of hoop jumping is required to take them somewhere else to play. The Blender community reports that if characters can be exported to Collada, then they can be imported in Blender, including the rig. Models can be downloaded as an FBX file, which is widely supported throughout the content-creation industry.

Mixamo builds out products and services

Mixamo was originally founded as an online tool provider offering an automatic rigging service and animations, and that is the company's primary business: serving the game development community. The company is also looking at possibly larger markets of people who are experimenting with 3D content creation and the creation of characters to use in games. Mixamo started out in 2008 as a cloud-based service offering a broad range of animations, from simple inexpensive moves to complex animations. The company also has a service division that creates custom animations for customers whose work went into titles such as Jurassic Park.

Along the way, they found their customers asking for tools for facial animation and for character creation, so the company has added on new capabilities, including the Fuse character-creation tool and Face Plus. In fact, the company's tools now combine online and offline features that work together pretty seamlessly in our experiments.

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