Design Doll: Awesome and Awful All At Once
So, I’ve been looking for a decent 3D tool that lets you pose an anatomically accurate human and play around with the camera angles and perspective distortion and stuff.
In my hunt, I stumbled across Design Doll which is... interesting?
Biggest Pros:
Free
Super customizable
Pose the doll any way you want in 3D space
Lots of control over camera angles, distortion, focal length, perspective, etc. It even has a Fake Perspective tool that lets you create your own perspective for wildly distorted images
Once you hit upon the right combination of settings, you can get a relatively decent representation of a human form
You can create highly stylized human forms, like chibis or grotesquely buff dudes
You can add as many models to the scene as your computer can handle
It comes with a hand and foot pose library
If you’re using this for comics or anime-style posing, the characters and poses have a very “anime” feel to them
Biggest Cons
Definitely NOT anatomically accurate
The free version doesn’t let you open files once you have saved them. So if you spend an hour sculpting the perfect character and posing him and setting up the camera just right, then save it and close the program, you can’t open the saved file until you pay for the program, which is $80 (reasonable, but not if you want something free, lol)
It’s SUPER customizable. Which means if you don’t know jack about how human proportions work, you will very likely not get an accurate representation. It gives you too much freedom in my opinion. I recommend that you DO NOT use this if you don’t have an understanding of human anatomy. Even if you do, use it with a grain of salt.
That being said, it doesn’t come with pre-built base figures (heavyset male, muscle woman, generic female, etc). You have to figure out which combination of body shapes creates what you want
Once you set the body shapes, you have to also adjust the size of each part of the body to make them look like they belong with each other. The sizing and shaping is not intuitive at all, so you have to know anatomy to get it to look right.
Posing is a bit tricky/glitchy and takes a bit of guess work
So... try it? I will probably use it every now and then. But don’t be shocked if you end up with a grossly distorted creature in a highly unnatural pose...>___>;
Side note: there’s also ArtPose, which I haven’t tried, but it looks like it has some useful muscle references:
