Greetings from Torino, Most of you have no idea who I am, but a few will recognize a dinosaur from the pre-Renderosity days. Anyway I have stopped by to pick your brains. In the hopes of not reinventing the wheel, I am researching all the methods previously, currently and potentially being employed in creating virtual human figures in 3D. Outside of the obvious Poser, Zygote, and DAZ sources, I have located the following sources over the last 10 years. Quidam (N-Sided) Face Gen People Putty (Haptek) Creature Creator (FXR Software) Creature Lab (FXR Software) Evolver (Darwin) Make Human DI-Guy (bdi) LifeForms Studio (credo-interactive) Mirai (izware) CharacterFX (insanesoftware) DMesh Facial Studio (Di-o-matic) Character Pack (Di-o-matic) Hercules (Di-o-matic) Absolute Character Tools (cgcharacter) cg Character (cgcharacter) cg Skin (cgcharacter) Character Studio (autodesk) CAT (softimage) Kaydara's Human IK Reflex DRAMA (reflex3d) SIMM (musclegraphics) LifeFX Lumonix Skin FX (ladyx) Muscles (petershipkov) LEMAN (Russell Turner and Enrico Gobbetti) If you have any info or links to Commercial, Freelance and/or University Research and Software that can be added to the list it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your assistance, Steven (Torino) NOTE: My Member Name Torino stopped working during one of the forum transitions years ago, so I switched to the Member Name Cyclone. PS For those of you who are hyper-curious, some of the items listed above disappeared years ago and now exist only in my paper records.

You are the guy who made the first Eve from the P4 Nude woman.  You were the first to split the thigh group into the buttocks/thight grpups.  You also pioneered ther inverted T chest, with the breasts in the collar groups.  Your Eve had dynamic breast that moved wtith the movement of the collars, that Daz failed to replicate until V3, and only after adding 4 times th nuber of vertices. 

Yes, I recognize your name, which is why I nominated you for the Poser Hall of Fame.
Davide P. Hoadley

You might wish to include 3d.sk and their satellite sites, as good sources of photo reference of random human bodies and skin and hair texture, as well as visual bending reference.  They're a very popular referencefor this stuff because of their blunt non-bashful (read: nude) presentation and very high quality imaging and high resolution, male and female models of a wide variety of physiques, ages, and ethnicities.

Attached Link: Movies

http://www.hash.com/2007web/

Watch the movies to see what it can do.

(If anyone remembers Alien Song by Victor Navonne, the "I will survive" and the mirror ball that squashes the alien, that was Hash Animation Master)

Attached Link: Lifemode Interactive

Attached Link: Steven Stahlberg's web site: Tutorials

And welcome back!

Some of those arent "human creators" though....

Absolute Character Tools (cgcharacter)
cg Character (cgcharacter)
cg Skin (cgcharacter)
Character Studio (autodesk)
Kaydara's Human IK

are rigging solutions, they dont create any geometry and you can use them for anything, not just humans.

Mirai (izware)

is a modeller, one of the first box modelling apps, now sadly defunct.

Also there is a bunch of more stuff that goes into creating virtual humans. Various skin shaders, texturing apps, hair systems, cloth systems, rendering systems and modellers are all used to simulate human appearence, musculature and motion. And a compositor like shake, AE or fusion to combine all this together to a final work.

Davide P. Hoadley thank you for the kind words. pjz99 thank you for you response, it is a very good resource. Helgard, I am almost embarrassed to say I had forgotten about Hash. I am heading there again to review the system and processes it employs. This also reminds me to review the now defunct Organica again. steerpike, very helpful link, I missed it in my searches. Staby, thanks for responding, I have followed his work over the years. ghonma, thanks for the help. The truly sad thing I have seen in the last few weeks are the software packages that have disappeared over the last 20 or so years. Many have faded from record and their work may be lost and forgotten. Back to the issue at hand. I have been working on cg humans for almost 20 years now, although I have been sort of dormant for the last 7 years. I recently started to look into the state of the art techniques again, and have found the situation has not progressed as rapidly as I believed it would. I have decided to reopen ideas I filed away years ago, figuring it would be common place now. My focus is on the very fundamentals of generating CG humans, specifically acheiving proper form and function. Details such as hair and clothing would be resolved later. The research info I have been searching for is any and all techniques used in generating any portion of the CG human form. I am trying to perform a comprehensive review of complete software packages for creating CG humans as well as all of tools currently used for modeling, rigging, posing, texturing, whatever. If someone is currently using a similar line of thought, I do not want to waste time redeveloping existing processes. Any help with locating pertinent info, especially the obscure or abandoned processes would be very helpful. Thank you for your time and assistance, Steven (Torino)

I hope this fits in with your list.

"I Clone" (Reallusion) www.reallusion.com/iclone/
"messiah:studio 2.4d" (pmG Worldwide, LLC) www.projectmessiah.com/

I hope your ideas blossom into something great. By the way Weight mapping for joints is a thing I always wished I had in Poser.

Edit to add. I still have Eve and modified it with stuff from so many of her variants. One of the best characters ever! Also gotta thank Traveler for hosting Eve on Morph World all those years. :)

Quote - I am trying to perform a comprehensive review of complete software packages for creating CG humans as well as all of tools currently used for modeling, rigging, posing, texturing, whatever.

Then you should also check out zBrush here:

zBrush

This is probably as state of the art as it gets right now. It's one of the fastest and easiest way to generate humans (and other critters) we have. Of course you do need some artistic skill, but the results you get in it are quite remarkable.

Dr Marquardt's geometric research is always valuable, though not specific to software per se. I actually had a great conversation with him a few years ago. Interesting person.

http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm

Silo by Nevercenter.

mylemonblue, thank you for the links, messiah website was a very interesting read ghonma, thank you for the link to zBrush, it all helps Helgard, my inquiries were not meant to demean or insult 3d artists and their work, much of which is amazing. I am sorry I am being vague, but I am working on the tools for the artist, not the art. I sincerely hope my imprecision did not offended you in any manner, but if I did, I offer a sincere apology. Anton, interesting info. You probably are aware of this site, but it popped up in an search I ran earlier. http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/index.htm Thanks for your help. ccotwist3D, thanks for your help. Funny thing is I went to Silo and was baffled with deja vue. I have been going though so much info that the name Silo did not immediately ring a bell, I was staring at the site and was positive it was actually the identical information to an entirely different application. It was an amusing 15 minutes trying to resolve my confusion. I truly appreciate all of the assistance, I figure I have at least another month of research ahead of me. Next step will involve confirmation the applicability of the processes to be employed. This is a very major undertaking based on a clean sheet concept. It is such a major project, I let it sit for all these years because I was sure some major software house would have tackled it by now. To date I have located nothing but some very tangential work. I am going to keep searching to confirm this. After all these years, I figure I should at least attempt to develop these concepts. Best regard to all, Steven (Torino)

Cyclone :

Do not know how dormant ya been or what ya searching for but.

For character animations most would use XSI,Maya.

The fab 5 app's LW,Max,C4D,Maya,XSI.

XSI is SoftImage.

zBrush micro displacement is kool,Used in LOTR.

These days most model with polygons and loops and Subdivide the mesh.

http://www.atomic-3d.com/RK_T_HyperNURBS.htm for example.

The rule goes only model with quads,cause " I think only " XSI,LW will subdivide a Tri, LOL.

The rest will turn a Tri in to a quad.

Loops don't work will with Tri's.

V4 was modeled in " I think " Modo ya can see where it turned Tri's to Quad's or they made a point to model in quads.

Part of LW broke off made Modo.

RorrKonn
http://www.Atomic-3D.com