You’re probably asking yourself two questions. 1) When did Eric get awesome at modeling humans? and 2) What are these bald, naked women doing on this site? In fact, you probably asked yourself those questions in the reverse order. Extra points for the MakeHuman team if you didn’t even realize those were computer images and thought they were real.

So, to start off with question 1, I didn’t model those humans in the traditional sense. In other words, I didn’t start with a box or plane and build up a human from there. Instead I used a program called MakeHuman which has similar goals to the commercial software Poser. Poser, as those of us into 3D art and animation know, is software for the posing, animating, and rendering of humans (and occasionally other creatures). Both software packages exist because animators may not want to also be character modelers. Instead they may wish to use a package such as MakeHuman which creates the character meshes and materials for them and then work on the animation. In such a context I wouldn’t call it cheating. After all, in a studio, most artists specialize on one part of the animation (eg animation, modeling, texturing, etc). I may even see myself using MakeHuman or Poser if I wished to have a realistic human character in my animation.