Thanks for the suggestions. I did find some cheaper characters, but chose the Amy character as it says it has all the visemes needed for lip sync setup by the artist, although I haven’t actually seen a demo of lip sync with it. It is also one of the higher quality characters I could find and is rigged for full body animation, so I thought it was a good choice to try to show off the character engine. We have successfully lip synced a talking car character before and don’t think we’ll have problems with this character especially since the artist already setup the viseme points.

I’ll definitely look into that MakeHuman model some, seems like it may be a good option too if we can’t raise enough to purchase the Amy character.

Robert Medeksza - Aug 4, 2011:

I’ll definitely look into that MakeHuman model some, seems like it may be a good option too if we can’t raise enough to purchase the Amy character.

Thanks for your reply.  This is getting interesting. Once again, just to politely clarify, in my opinion the company you mentioned is really very impressive, so my discussion here is not intended to recommend against their high quality 3D models.  I noticed they support free stuff like GMAX which is very generous, and I think supporting good companies like that is important to promote Artificial Intelligence.

This just may be a good opportunity to open a dialog about how free low quality open source 3D character models may compare to commercial high quality 3D character models, in your 3D Character engine.

I visited the MakeHuman forum today. Sammy said, “I’m currently writing a 3D game using Ogre3D. ” and then later mentioned, “The poly count is slightly lower than on the original MakeHuman one” which suggests it may be a good option to add a wider range of characters to an Ogre3D Character engine.

Some pictures: http://www.makehuman.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1236