MakeHuman is an interesting bit of software “for the modeling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters”. In the computer world, characters can be represented as a ‘mesh’ of triangles and this software provides a mesh and tools to manipulate it.

The clever bit is manipulating the mesh via features, for example age. Increasing the age changes the mesh to reflect how a body changes through maturity, so males fill out round the gut and lose muscle tone. Depressingly familiar. Alongside the range of features the mesh itself can changed too, for instance lengthening an arm - but all the time preserving anatomical correctness.

The software will run on a variety of platforms, my first attempt at a straight install on Ubuntu wasn’t a great success due to loads of missing libraries mainly python-dev and SDL libraries. Ah, the delights of NOT installing everything on your machine… Eventually I downloaded the source, installed the required libraries via Ubuntus package manager and compiled - it went through cleanly first time and ran perfectly. RTFM developers guide.

At the moment the software is in alpha so there’s a lot of abilities missing but the roadmap look promising, The idea is to use it to provide pose-able models which I can use to help draw people - something I’m really not hot at! In the meantime pose maniacs will have to do.