Best 3D Character Creators for Windows

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.

Character Creator (CC) is a full character creation solution for designers to easily generate, import and customize stylized or realistic character assets for use with iClone, Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, or any other 3D tools. CC connects industry-leading pipelines with one system for 3D character generation, animation rigging, asset management, look-dev rendering, and interactive design. Whether humans, creatures or props, creativity is no longer limited by the existing CC character base. Any rigged biped models can be imported, characterized, and facial rigged in Character Creator. New features now make any character compatible with thousands of motion assets, ready for natural lip-sync, motion capture, and animation controls in iClone. CC characters can also be optimized for low-poly, high-performance crowd simulation, AR, VR, and Metaverse.

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.

iClone is the fastest real-time 3D animation software in the industry, helping you easily produce professional animations for films, previz, animation, video games, content development, education and art. Integrated with the latest real-time technologies, iClone simplifies the world of 3D Animation in a user-friendly production environment that blends character animation, scene design and cinematic storytelling; quickly turning your vision into a reality. Animate any character instantly with intuitive tools for face and body animation. Create facial animations with accurate lip-sync, puppet emotive expressions, muscle-based face key editing, and an unparalleled iPhone facial capture. Create realistic or stylized, animation-ready humanoid 3D characters in a short time. Powerful animation features get scenes moving thanks to ultimate creative control.

Ziva VFX is changing the way 3D characters are brought to life for films, games, and interactive experiences. With Ziva's intuitive toolset, artists can replicate the effects of physics and simulate any soft-tissue material, including muscles, fat, and skin to create blockbuster-quality assets with ease. Ziva VFX lets you simulate the materiality of any soft tissue, using intuitive parameters and real-world units. Everything was purpose-built for creature work. Ziva Anatomy Transfer tools let you replicate, warp, and retarget creatures rapidly, so you can adapt and multiply your existing creatures for infinite hero-quality characters. Character alterations can be applied retroactively at nearly anytime. Simply adapting the underlying anatomy of your characters will allow you to react faster to changes and last-minute decisions. Use multiple material types, producing robust motion even under large deformations, StVK, NeoHookean, co-rotational, anisotropic.

People and crowd animation software was developed specifically for architects and designers to add 3D animated characters to their projects quickly and easily. With anima®, 3D people become human beings. The new 4D Digital Humans are able to preserve every detail of the clothing and offer impressive facial animations. In addition, with the Ambient 3D characters you can populate the middle and front planes of a scene increasing the realism. anima® uses the same high-quality 3D people found in our metropoly® collections, so there’s no need to compromise on quality. Our actors are driven by real mocap data and a sophisticated AI engine with an automatic procedural motion to achieve super-realistic crowd animations. Add life to your Archviz or any other visualization project! anima® brings up a toolset to easily populate your still renderings and animation videos using our 3D Scanned Metropoly® Ready-Posed and Metropoly® Rigged 3D Human models.

Mango Animate helps teachers create captivating animation videos that will keep their students engaged. Use eye-catching explainer animation videos to tell business stories, improve marketing results, and motivate your audiences to take action. With the help of templates and free assets from the animation video maker, you can make amazing animation videos that fit your needs in minutes. Free animation video maker to make explainer videos, promo videos, training videos, whiteboard videos, and character videos. A huge library of free media objects is prebuilt in the animation video maker and ready to use. Images, SVGs, animation widgets, effects, SWFs, symbols, shapes, and charts will certainly enrich your animated video creation. Mango Animation Maker is not only a whole new animated video software but also the next-generation user-oriented animation video maker. Adding an emotional touch to your animation videos has never been easier!

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.

Capture, edit, and play back complex animations with MotionBuilder® 3D character animation software. Work in an interactive environment optimized to help you work faster and more efficiently without compromising creativity. Produce high-quality 3D character animations with prebuilt moves. Create realistic character movements using one of the industry's fastest animation tools. Fine-tune character animations with production-proven tools used to manipulate motion capture data. Included software development kit and FBX data exchange enable easy interoperability with other 3D applications. MotionBuilder software is available with a subscription only. We no longer sell perpetual licenses. Your MotionBuilder subscription gives you access to install and use the 3 previous versions. With a subscription to MotionBuilder software, you can install it on up to 3 computers or other devices.

Stunning photo-scanned 3D people models. Add life to your architectural visualization projects and renders with metropoly® 3d People Characters. Compatible with 3ds Max®, Maya®, Cinema 4D®, Blender®, Unreal Engine®, Lightwave®, SketchUp®, Rhino® and anima® with support for the best renderers in the industry. We work with passion combining technology and craftsmanship, a perfect union to obtain realistic 3D characters. Through the use of modern 3D photogrammetric scanning technologies and the craftwork of our group of artists, we strive to make Metropoly 3D People near to perfection. Our 3D human models are designed and optimized to offer the best performance during rendering, adding details where they are really needed. For our static models, we create meshes with about 40K polygons while the 3D characters for animation are retopologized to offer the best deformation during the animation and designed to be easily edited and modified.

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.

Design Doll is a software program that can freely manipulate human body models in 3D space. You can create postures and compositions that artists demand, with easy, intuitive operations. Design Doll uses a blending method, where forms and sizes of various parts to be changed freely, allowing models to be reproduced with head to body ratios that intuitively suit the drawing. With various perspective functions, deformations resembling hand drawings or emphatic expressions that cannot be represented with other 3D software are possible. Along with parallel projection, false perspectives, real perspectives and lens perspectives, functions such as eye level displays and change of camera perspective (viewing angle) are also available. A dedicated controller for moving fingers minutely has been made available. By creating the rough shape in simple mode, then moving on to detailed mode, hand shapes can be created quickly.

ActorCore AccuRIG is a free application designed for fast and easy character rigging, aiming to reduce production effort for character artists to focus on the model design with its automation and simplicity. Achieve accurate and superior rigging results in 5 simple steps for models in A/T/scan poses, or with low/high/multiple meshes. Direct export to major 3D tools, or upload to ActorCore and try tons of production-ready animations designed for game, film, archviz, digital twins and more. System Requirements Minimum Requirements Dual Core CPU 4GB RAM 5GB free hard disk space Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce GTX 400 Series / AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series Video Memory: 1GB Ram Display Resolution: 1024 x 768 Color Depth: True Color (32-bit) Operating System Windows 11, 10, and 8 Support for 64-bit Operating System DirectX 11 required

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.

CrazyTalk Animator 3 (CTA3) is an animation solution that enables all levels of users to create professional animations and presentations with the least amount of effort. With CTA3, anyone can instantly bring an image, logo, or prop to life by applying bouncy elastic motion effects. For the character part, CTA3 is built with 2D character templates, vast motion libraries, a powerful 2D bone rig editor, facial puppets, and audio lip-syncing tools to give users unparalleled control when animating 2D talking characters for videos, web, games, apps, and presentations. animate 2D character. Animate 2D characters with 3D motions. Elastic and bouncy curve editing. Facial puppet and audio lip-syncing. 2D facial free-form deformation. 3D camera system and motion path and timeline editing. Motion curve and render style. Create 2D characters, 2D character rigging, and bone tools. Character templates for humans, animals, and more.

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.

Omniverse™ Audio2Face beta is a reference application that simplifies animation of a 3D character to match any voice-over track, whether you’re animating characters for a game, film, real-time digital assistants, or just for fun. You can use the app for interactive real-time applications or as a traditional facial animation authoring tool. Run the results live or bake them out, it’s up to you. Audio2Face lets you retarget to any 3D human or human-esque face, whether realistic or stylized. This makes swapping characters on the fly—whether human or animal—take just a few clicks. The latest update to Omniverse Audio2Face now enables blendshape conversion and also blendweight export options. Plus, the app now supports export-import with Blendshapes for Blender and Epic Games Unreal Engine to generate motion for characters using their respective Omniverse Connectors.

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.