Architecture - Character Design?

I feel as though perhaps our Architecture lecturer has this small sadistic spot in trying to make students fear and panic. If I had a pound for every time he mentioned how little time we have, I could repay my student debt. Some of it may well be true but 7 months for one level shouldn't really be a problem. Or, for the proposed idea I have, it shouldn't be a problem. Maybe this means that  I'm not gonna hit high marks or the criteria to begin with? I should really catch him and talk about my plans with him just to make sure.

What I have to talk about today is something I honestly expected to see in our AV lessons, not our coding lessons. Two pieces of software that are all about creating character meshes so that you don't have to.

The first of which, is called "MakeHuman," an open source software developed with 12 years of body topology research by a group called the MakeHuman Team. So, I mean, I guess these are just industry people who have spent a lot of time making characters!

Two guesses why I'm not too fond on this software. Those eyes... MakeHuman 1.1.0, 2016

This software so far, despite how useful it seems on the broad spectrum, doesn't seem like the kind of software that I would use for my project however. There are a lot of customizable sliders that allow for a lot of tweaking your perfect character and the option to rig your character as well, which could prove invaluable. There are also a few materials that you can apply for skin colour and clothes, but currently it's too realistic for what I am looking for. This seems like a sims esque software, something you would expect to see in a game that was aiming for graphics. Being that I am not strong in art, I've purposefully chosen to create a game that I can get away with not being super realistic.

Also, something that really bugged me, the age slider is very nonsensical. You can move the slider more than a quarter of the way to go from toddler to child, but then accidentally breathe on your mouse and whoops you're a withered 140 year old.

If you can construct the character on the right in this software though, then it could prove very useful. MakeHuman 2016

I am aware of the fact that you are not supposed to take this and just leave it as it is, and that this is intended to be a barebones starting point that we would be expected to craft with in Mudbox or Maya or 3DS Max. Perhaps once we have a few more lessons into AV it might become more useful.

Ranging from some very scary blue... things, to Urbz: Sims in the City, and down to military games. Fuse, Adobe 2016

Secondly, we also have a similar piece of software called "Fuse." The software installed at university computers is Adobe Fuse CC, but doing a little bit of research it seems this is also available as a standalone, available in unity, and also in steam. It seems to be intended to be used in tandem with an animating programme called "Mixamo," which when our tutor mentioned, nobody had heard of and he seemed very surprised. I can only imagine that this means we will be using or at least learning about this software in AV.

In the brief play around that we had, I took a liking to this software more than Make Human. For a few reasons. Firstly, the previews of your mesh looked a lot more friendly, and what you would see in engine as opposed to their own orange tinted preview that seems very rough and not quite the final product.

Secondly, and this might seem like a small thing, but applying clothes to your mesh as previews didn't stack needlessly (If you chose one outfit, then chose another, your mesh would try to wear both. Why!?) and any changes made to the body would make Fuse recalculate the mesh and make sure clothes, hair, etc didn't clip.

Lastly, something that our tutor taught us, is that some of these outfits on Fuse come with, say, pistol holsters, or gas masks. These individual assets can be taken from Fuse, saved individually as an OBJ, then imported for you to use. Easy!

I think, given the choice, I would use Fuse a lot more than Make Human. At the moment though, we have nothing to go on apart from 5 minutes of playing about to see what it's like. We haven't been taught how to implement or change any of these to what we would like, so I feel I may be more biased towards Fuse because it seems to give a quicker end game asset that is ready for use.