Human Generator addon Review (Blender)

in this video we'll check out the human generator add-on for blender this add-on can generate realistic human characters for you there are external apps for that but this add-on gives you at least some of the functionality of these specialized apps right in blender this is a paid add-on you can get it on the blender market and it is a very well designed product you will barely need a tutorial to use human generator so this video will be more of a review or overview of the add-on currently the stable version of human generator is version 3. and version 4 is in beta in this video I'll mainly show you version 4 because it has cool new features and it will become the stable version in the near future installing human generator is not difficult but it is a little bit different than other blender add-ons aside from the main add-on you have to install content packs first on the blender Market you have to download all files related to the version of human generator that you want to install in the case of version 4 the first zip file is the actual add-on and the HG pack files are the content in version 3 the first zip file is the add-on and the remaining zip files are the content now I'm going to install version 4 in blender go to edit preferences add-ons click on install go to the folder where you downloaded the add-on and I'm going to install version 4. click the checkbox to enable it and expand the options first you want to select the folder where the content will be unzipped here I'm going to create a new folder and click on change path then you want to select the content box which are the HG pack files that we downloaded select all of them and click this button and finally click on install all content packs once you have the add-on and the content installed you can start using the add-on and generating humans so I have to expand the end panel and go to the Hume gen tab from the default screen that you get here you can choose a base character and so you have more generic characters called Asian black Caucasian and so on and you have ones with names which are already customized for you they look less generic and more like an interesting character but you can start from any character and tweak it to be exactly as you like so if you want to create your own custom character you should start with one of the more generic ones let's say the Asian bass and click generate new Human by the way you also have female characters but in this video I'll be showing the male ones just because they're less likely to trigger YouTube so as soon as you press the generate button it will generate a human for you and you see that it's already rigged actually to see things properly you can enable material preview give it a second and then I'll go to object mode here and I can also disable overlays and that way the rig will not get in the way so from here we can start customizing the character here in the menu you have a bunch of categories and so you can go through them one by one and tweak your character so first let's go to Buddy and here the main parameters are how muscular your character is or how heavy it is or how skinny it is so if you want to make it more muscular you just have to increase the muscular slider if you want to add more fat to your body you can increase the overweight slider and if you want to make it more skinny you can drag the skinny slider the cool thing is that these are just sliders and you can play with them and see what you get everything is instantaneous it's right in the viewport so that is why I said that you don't really need a tutorial you just play with the sliders so you can go to the arms and tweak specific parameters for the arms and something new in version 4 is that you can tweak the individual length of the limbs such as tweaking only the forearm making it longer or shorter you can increase the thickness make the hand longer and so on you can tweak individual muscles so yeah just play with the sliders and customize your character now let's say that we are done with the body to move on to customizing another area you have a couple of options you can press this arrow button and that will take you to the age category you can also use this drop down and just choose which category you want to edit or you can press the back button and again choose a category from this menu so let's do it one by one I'll go to H in here just by dragging this slider you can make your character appear much older or younger and then you have again individual settings as to how this aging affects the hair of the character which we haven't applied yet and also the shape and skin texture of the character so let's make him a middle-aged guy and move on next we can customize the face and this is an area where you may want to spend a lot of time you do have a lot of options and as always you just drag sliders and you can see what what is happening in the viewport so if nothing seems to be happening you may be looking at this shape that is changing from the wrong direction in this case I just have to look at the side of the character and play with this and you'll see the customization that we are making you have the option to randomize all sliders and this was also available for the body and in other parts of the atom and if you don't want a specific character but a random one you can just press this and you'll get a fairly different type of character then press it again and it will change quite a lot again and so you can just keep clicking until you find something you like then of course you can keep playing with the sliders to customize it even more as always these sliders are intuitive and you can just play with them what is interesting is that you can press this button to reset the sliders to their initial default and let's move on so here we have the height of the character and this can actually change the appearance of the human quite a lot if I make him much taller you'll see that it changes quite a lot and now the legs became very thin so you may want to go back to body and maybe make the calf muscles a little bit thicker now back to height if I enable overlays what is cool is that as I'm tweaking this height you'll see that the rig adjusts automatically so this is very cool and it is not something that is Trivial to make in blender so the add-on is doing something rather complex in the background let's move on next we have the skin of the character um because we chose an Asian character it automatically got a suitable skin but here we can actually choose from a number of presets so we can choose a darker color and that will dramatically change the look of the character again you have sliders to tweak the look of the skin you can make the normal map more pronounced and you can also tweak the roughness of the skin but I find the default kind of nice you can turn on subsurface scattering which will make the skin look more realistic you can change the color of the eyes and you can add details such as freckles and splotches and you can give the character unshaven look we can also add facial hair you'll see in a second and as always you can randomize next we have here so you can choose from a number of hair presets you can change the appearance of the hair making it lighter or darker you can even give it unrealistic diet color salt and pepper will add white hairs to your characters making them look more aged you can add eyebrows and then change their type with the next button next previous and again you can change the color so a character is starting to get a little bit extravagant but you know usually you would just go for a more realistic colors you can also add facial hair and here you have control over the length of the individual hair particles okay moving on when you go to another area most of the hair will be hidden that is just to make your viewport faster but the hair is still here you can click this here button and it will appear again and also when you render it will always appear in full detail so here you can give your character clothing which is cool uh but this is probably one of the weaknesses of the atom the clothes don't necessarily look great they are not bad but not great either sometimes they may stretch really badly sometimes you may see the body poking through the clothing they do have some problems and I hope this will be improved in later versions of the atom but what is cool is that even though I have clothes on my character I can keep customizing it I can make it taller and the clothes will automatically adapt to the height I can play with the body type and the clothes will adapt so that is really nice it's just that let's say if I try to create a pose with the skeleton you'll see stretching in the clothes for example so this can be fixed by selecting the cloth and going to modifiers and adding smooth corrective and placing it above the subdivision modifier and you'll see that improved the glove a little bit but it still has ways to go also the viewport performance may be a little bit slow so what you can do about that is to go to render properties enable simplify expand it and set max subdivision to zero so that will disable subdivision modifier in the viewport but it will be enabled for rendering so that will make the viewport snap here and you can also switch to shaded View and that will make it even more responsive by the way if you select any of these cloves here the interface will change and it will let you change the colors okay same for the genes and then if you want to go back to editing the character you just have to select the character mesh and we can keep exploring you can go to pose here and so you have a library of simple poses such as seeking or you have the option to create a vidify rig so right now we have this simple rig if I press generate rigid 5 rig the simple poses that we saw earlier will not work anymore but I'll be able to use rigify to pose and even animate my character any way I like okay and if you're not familiar with rigify most of my channel is about rigify so you can check out my other videos and it's important to note that if you convert to rigify you're breaking some of the modularity of your character so you may no longer be able to adjust the height of the character and so on so keep that in mind uh rigify should be added at the very end when you are done with your character customization and we also have Expressions similar to the body rig we have the option to choose from a list of simple expressions or we can create a face rig so all I need to do is press add facial rig actually before that I'm going to undo and I'm going to place the character in the default position and now create the phase read so now we have these little dots at the face which if I go to pose mode I can move and I can freely pause the face of my character you can even apply facial motion capture to this character I'm not going to go into detail right now but it is possible and you can just click on the air kit tutorial here and follow the steps so this is all about creating and customizing individual characters let's look at how we can create another custom character in this same scene so I'm going to press the back button here and move this character which is done now out of the way then press on this deselect button because right now we are focusing on this character so press the deselect button and that will allow you to create another human so you can just choose a preset generate human and you can keep customizing it just like the first one when you have multiple characters you can press these arrows to focus on a specific character so I'm going to create another one foreign I can use the arrows to focus on each character and the character in Focus will be the one which can be tweaked okay moving on I'm going to create a new scene and let's batch create a couple of characters if you press shift and a the add-on added a new feature here so you can choose between apos or t-pos so a basic pose from which you can create other poses or you can choose a couple of post presets so let's go for the poses I'll make one character standing around and place it somewhere I can place the cursor over here shift a add a socializing guy and place the cursor at another place and add a sitting character now let's adjust the height and maybe give them the plane to sit on to stand on and then go to human generator go to this next tab showing many characters and because we added three characters in here we have a button saying generate three humans so if I add another guy or girl it will say generate 4. and you can also generate only the selected markers so if I select two of them I'll I'll be able to generate two humans but I'll go for all then for permeability you have the probability of gender and race and by default it is set to completely random if you're creating a scene that shows let's say Tokyo you can decrease the number of non-asian types and and generate you can enable clothing for these characters expressions and hair and Define their height limit you can change the quality so because you're generating many characters you may want to reduce the quality it is automatically set to medium you can go for high which is the default for individual characters or you can reduce it even more if the characters are going to be more in the background so now I'll reduce it and then generate for humans so it will take a while but once it is done you'll have four characters and they're exactly in the poses that we defined with the presets if I enable material preview you'll see them fully textured and so this can be a great way to populate let's say architectural visualization scenes or if you just need background characters for your animation that can be done with this tool as well they are not animated just post I guess the video so far didn't really emphasize that the models that you get from Human generator look great especially when rendered in Cycles with hair and so on here are three characters that I created in about 10 minutes and I don't think there is any other way in which you can create such high quality characters in such a short time and do it all in blender finally the add-on also offers some Advanced features such as creating your own custom content technically it should be possible to create your own base humans custom clothing and so on if you would like more information about that let me know in the comments if there is enough interest I will try to figure it out and make a video about it if you would like to purchase human generator there is a link in the video description it's an affiliate link if you buy through it I'll get a little commission the price doesn't change for you so it's a great way to support the channel you can also support CG Dive by clicking like subscribe leaving a comment and so on appreciate it thank you

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 19,411

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: 9NVqCrgb8wU

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023