Best 3D Character Creators for Mac

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now.

Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls.

3D digital painting and sculpting software. Create beautiful characters and environments with Mudbox. Sculpt and paint highly detailed 3D geometry and textures. Mudbox® 3D digital sculpting and texture painting software gives you an intuitive, tactile toolset. Create highly detailed 3D characters and environments using an intuitive set of digital tools based on real sculpting techniques. Paint directly on your 3D assets across multiple channels. Add resolution to a mesh only in areas that need it with an artist-friendly, camera-based workflow. Create clean, production-quality meshes from scanned, imported, or sculpted data. Bake normal, displacement, and ambient occlusion maps. Get effective, brush-based workflows for polygons and textures. Bring assets from Maya into Mudbox to add detailed geometry. Send characters from Maya LT to Mudbox for sculpting and texturing. Then transfer your model back to Maya LT. Take your 3D assets and environments from first draft to final frame.

3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.

Poser is a 3D computer graphics program optimized for 3D modeling of human figures. It is known for enabling digital artists to easily produce 3D animations and digital images, as well as the extensive availability of third-party digital content. Since 1995, Poser has been the go-to software tool for 3D characters in illustration and animation for over 500,000 digital artists. Poser is a digital stage that gives you full creative control. Work with 3D figures for any project requiring rendered images or animated video. Drag 3D content right from Poser’s own library of over 5 GB of content onto the stage and into your scene. Upgrade to Poser 12 from any Poser 11 license. Enjoy GPU rendering and import/export support for major 3D software packages. Poser 12 is a 3D universe that allows users to easily illustrate and animate using its new features including a new SuperFly render engine, expanded graphic card support, a new post effects palette, Python 3 support, and more.

MakeHuman is an open source (AGPL3) tool designed to simplify the creation of virtual humans using a Graphical User Interface, also commonly referred to as a GUI. This is a specialized branch of the more general subject of 3D modelling. The MakeHuman Team is focused on this specific branch of the broader subject in order to achieve the best possible level of quality and ease of use in that area. The ultimate goal is to be able to quickly produce a wide array of realistic virtual humans with only a few clicks of the mouse and be able to render or export them for use in other projects.

This technology is often compared to 3D animation. However with 3D animation, an entirely new model is constructed based on the original illustration, while Live2D utilizes the original illustration directly. This allows you to provide dynamic expressions while directly harnessing the charm of the drawn character. The use of Live2D software technology breathes life into your drawn character and generates a much greater effect from the static art. This will help your audience develop a stronger emotional attachment to the character. Many of the works created using Live2D have their origins in traditional 2D, whether a visual novel or famous illustration. This demonstrates that 2D artists and fans value Live2D’s advantage in preserving the authenticity and rich graphics of the original 2D art rendered in modern applications.

Bforartists is a complete, free and open source 3D suite to create 3D content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, prerendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing. Bforartists stands for Be For Artists. A reminder to develop for the user, not the programmer. Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3D software Blender. Developed by some 3D enthusiasts to make Blender even better. The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy. Away from the hotkey and speed centered usage. Towards a user friendly and intuitive graphical UI. Bforartists is fully compatible with the Blender files and addons. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists. And we are always up to date with the newest Blender version. The toolset is the same.

Animate 3D characters for games, film, and more. Empowering creativity with animated 3D characters. Bring your projects to life with 3D characters, skeletal rigs, and animations, ready for use in film, games, interactive experiences and illustration. Browse a collection of high-quality 3D characters. From realistic to cartoon, fantasy to sci-fi, there’s a character for every purpose. Each character comes fully textured and rigged so you can use immediately in your creative projects. Upload your custom character to Mixamo and get an automatically rigged full human skeleton, custom fit to your model and ready to animate. Customize your rigging options with optimizations for mobile performance. Explore a library of thousands of full-body character animations, captured from professional motion actors. Each animation is transferred to your own character and can be previewed and edited directly with Mixamo, so you can control the look and feel of each motion.

You can start creating right after download; with many ready-to-use preset items, you won’t need to create anything from scratch. You just need to pick items you like and adjust their parameters! Not only is 3D modeling on VRoid Studio as easy as drawing on paper, but this software also gives you total freedom to express your originality, customizing minor features down to the finest detail. VRoid Studio is free to use for anyone. It’s super-easy to set up, as you just need to download it, and then you’re good to go. Models you create on VRoid Studio are yours to use freely on many different platforms and services. Facial features, hairstyles, outfits, and every other preset item is customizable in shape, color, design, and much more via intuitive sliders. Models are customizable in many ways, and you can check each edit in real-time. Little by little, anyone can design their ideal model.