After some pressure to get people into my model rail, I took a look at some pre-moulded figures.
A small selection of unpainted people works out around £6 for a pack of ten. Sure, there are more on Amazon and elsewhere, but I’m keen to use this as an opportunity to learn, and create custom poses.
Enter MakeHuman, a fantastic resource for creating 3d models of people, with many of the base models CC0 (essentially a do-as-you-want licence). The same community has also built a Blender extension, which means you can create models right in Blender.
Installation in Blender 4 is pretty easy – you drag the file directly in and it loads itself. There’s a bit more work to do with assets (such as poses, body elements and clothes).
It’s a bit buried in the new tab that is created in Blender’s main view, under Apply Assets > Library Settings, then under Install assets. You’ll want to ‘Load pack from zip file’ for each of the assets you choose to use.
Create a Human
Creating a human is only a few clicks, although it’s easy to get lost in the complex (and very capable) menus. New Human > From scratch then Create Human. Plenty of options to choose from.
The next stage is to create a rig. You’ll need this to manage your human’s pose. By default this creates a simple rig that allows you to control arms, legs and head.
This is in Rigging > Add rig and (with the model selected) Add standard Rig.
From this point, you can load poses, clothes and other assets for incorporation into the model.
Scaling
OO gauge is 1:76, which means a foot in real life is 4mm in scaled down version. That should be fairly straightforward to scale in either Blender or your slicer of choice for 3D printing – it’s a scale of 0.0132
Outcome
Very easy to put together in Blender, although I need to learn more about posing to get away from the standard packages (which strangely don’t seem to have any standing poses).
And the output is … fine. Not great, but I’ve not taken any care with the printing or supports. I created a little stand for the character to sit on, and all seems to work well! Total time from start to print-out was easily less than an hour, very much benefitting from MakeHuman.
