Fastish Character Creators Since Fuse is About to be Dead

so with the lifeline of Adobe Fuse ending soon I was wondering what the alternatives to it are now?
I looked at Mixamo and the stuff is already made which can be nice but I was hoping it was an actual alternative, instead it's more like what we're stuck with.

I can do some Blender work but I don't find it efficient for stuff like game jams plus it's, to me a newbie, kinda hard. I know of Poser but correct me if I'm wrong that's mostly an animation software app, not really a 3-d model/character creator.

 

Is Fuse really about to die? where did you hear that?

I have the pre Adobe version (in Steam) which still allows to create characters (I made the base for my avatar with it) but without rig. My plan was to rig it in Blender using a tool like AutoRig Pro (which also exports to Unity). I've been too busy to try this workflow though.

 

I recently found out about the MB lab Blender plugin:
https://mb-lab-community.github.io/MB-Lab.github.io/

It's super fast and easy-to-use. It's almost like an in-game character editor. Not sure about hair and clothes, though. The other problem is that all of the base meshes are AGPL and that extends to anything you create with it. Probably no good for commercial projects, but that should be fine for game jams.

 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/fuse-beta/adobe-announces-the-end-of-fuse-cc/td-p/10612234?page=1

https://theblog.adobe.com/an-update-on-adobe-fuse-as-adobe-moves-to-the-future-of-3d-ar-development/

Apparently, it will be pulled from Creative Cloud at September 13.

So adobe bought it, did nothing with it, and now killed it.

You could try Manuel Bastioni Lab... except Manuel Bastione took it all down, and it is now maintained as an unofficial fork on github, which will cause problems with license of produced models, I think.

You could also try makehuman... except character creation process is arcane and awkward, and developers made inconvenient and strange decisions, like their vendetta against perspective camera or strange interpretation of CC0 license.

There's also Daz3D, which is geared towards making still renders, but still can be used to create models for 3d games, IF you're willing to pay for game developer license or whatever it is called.

I also heard that there's iClone, but never used it. They used to have character modeler that worked within unity on asset store, but I think it got pulled down.

Personally, I gave up on character creators. It is easier to make a lowpoly model with its entire rig rather than dealing with all the creator quirks. However, this might not be a popular opinion.

 

You can use original Bastioni LAB if you're content with BLender 2.79, that will only require attribution.

 

I'll grab the one off steam after the current Fuse is pulled and test it out to see if it still works fine. I could try rigging in Blender though you're right but I'm just trying to see what other things I can do now

 

For context, "Adobe Fuse" used to be called "Mixamo Fuse", and it was basically the character creation part of the Mixamo pipeline.

 

So is part of Fuse, the character creator as you said, alive in Mixamo then? Because it doesn't look like I can download mixamo. And when I look up Fuse it says that it will not be supported or will be buggy if I try to integrate it with Mixamo.

 

Nobody gonna mention Character Creator 3?
https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/

 

Well, you could describe what's great about it....

 

It makes characters. You can try out their free demo. They have a Unity import export/import workflow if you dig through some tutorials. I don't use it, but I tried out the demo last year and it seemed to be the best of these type of aut-generators. (But I think it's ultimately better to learn how to deal with characters in Max or Blender).

 

character creator looks amazing, but in mi opinion it is too expensive for an indie

 

I guess it depends on project and individual skills more than anything but I recommend look for products that have greater maturity and support, more so than cutting edge feature sets.

For that, Daz is pretty solid. Spend less than $100 to get a range of basemeshes and morph packages and you can easily output hundreds of distinct characters in no time.

I checked out the Character Creator thing and the features look nice and all, but the pricing scheme is a nightmare. Very shady, very hard to understand. One of those schemes were it seems intentionally designed to rope you in before you have enough info to factor in the total cost. I don't respect a model like that.

Not saying to disregard it, just something to consider. Factor in what you really need for your project, dont get distracted by "possibilities". Think about how many hours daily you'll be working with the software. How much time can you afford to lose to troubleshooting little issues. Stuff like that is important.

 

Just looked at the page briefly, but it's only $299.00 one-time for the Character Creator 3 pipeline bundle, right (Unless I'm missing something here)? Then you can make as many characters as you want. That's super-cheap compared to contracting custom characters. Even characters on the Asset Store can cost $50+, so if you made as few as 6 characters you'd be ahead of the game.

Obviously the cheapest solution is to just not have characters...

Edit: Not trying to convince anyone to buy it (I haven't tried it myself)- just pointing out that it's not really expensive if it is what it appears to be.

Edit:

I'm not seeing that, myself. Can you elaborate? It looked pretty-straight forward to me but now I wonder if something is escaping my notice.

 

It was a little while back I checked it out so I forgot the details, but it seemed like to do the work I needed it would be necessary to get a lot of very expensive add-ons. And figuring out what those were and details about it was difficult because there is young/small community of support.

There is a free trial so by all means, check it out. I just wouldnt drop any money until you are able to vet your full pipeline.

edit * - and compare to daz, which is completely free to use. You only need to purchase the models you want, which are dirt cheap, and morph packages which cost like $15 allow a non-character artist to easily create distinct characters in pretty efficient way. There is basically no funny business. It's easy to tally up your price tag.

 

Unfortunately this is not true. The whole monkey-business with separate "Interactive license"-s and that you need to buy it individually for every single author and sometimes items is very confusing.

Not to mention that if you use Daz, you need a separate license if you want to distribute IRL 3D items with your game (for example action-figure of your main character based on Daz base mesh). I know it sounds remote and mute at this point, but when you are planning a project you need to think about the possibility, what happens if it gets popular. And AFAIK there is no known price for this additional license.

Obviously I'm not saying that Daz is bad or anything, I'm just saying it is not that clear cut and you still have bumps on the road which you need to think about. It is possible that you don't care about games or action figures/statues.

 

I didn't even know that was a thing. good points!

 

I read Fetish Character Creator

 

Daz requires interactive license, which is extra payment. Used to be either $200 or $500 before, apparently it is just an extra payment per model.

Another problem is that Daz characters has been used in wide range of amateur visual novels and using the same characters might make your game look amateurish (at least to people who saw those characters before).

 

Nah, that's Poser's main market.

 

Sorry for the late response... =)
You can still use Fuse... I still use the preview release... you just have to double click a while on the .exe and then it starts...
It doesn´t need to be installed... just copy the software to disk and start...
Great old software =)

 

Currently Makehuman became a viable option. They changed license of their topologies to CC0.