Short and Long Pipeline

Makehuman was created to provide everyone with specialized software that strives to be the state of the art in a very specific field: the virtual human. The goal is to see it used in two different pipelines or workflows.

Short Pipeline#

The short pipeline is intended for quick character prototyping and for 2D art. The user defines the character, adds clothes, hair, a pose and expressions, by selecting them from our libraries, and running the render to obtain an image of the character (future goal: indistinguishable from a real photo of him).This output can be used as a character preview, fineart, blueprints, storyboards, comics, illustrations, etc.. No special skill is required from the user.

Long Pipeline#

The long pipeline is intended to create a 3D character in rest pose for export to external software (Blender, Maya, Max, C4D, etc..) in order to be tweaked, animated and rendered. Another common usage of the rest-posed character is for games. The long pipeline requires the user to have professional skills and a good working knowledge of the external tools chosen to produce the desired final product. Some additional help with navigating various long pipeline workflows is available [http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/MakeHuman_Workflows].