"There are lots of options for creating 3D characters for
animation, and they are often made from scratch by mesh-modeling
artists. But it's obviously a very often-needed task, using a lot
of common elements, so you'd think someone would come up with a
tool to make it easier. And you'd be right. The free-software tool
of choice for this task is MakeHuman. I had looked into a much
earlier version of the software before, but today it is rapidly
approaching the first real release, version 1.0 (currently it's at
1.0-Alpha 5, with plans to go through several more alphas still).
The progress is remarkable, and this is going to be a really
important tool for 3D modeling in the future. Making Movies with
Free Software
"Of course, my first question is, "Can we just use this for the
characters in Lunatics?" And, failing that, "How far can we go with
it?"