The Character Builder interface allows you to create characters by choosing their ancestors from a library and mixing together different features to create a new character. All images courtesy of George Maestri. 

Building a digital character is not an easy task. It requires the skills of a sculptor to create the model, the skills of a painter to texture the skin and the skills of an technical director to build the skeleton and rig the character. Most production houses hire separate artists and technicians to complete each part of this pipeline. A typical character can take days or weeks to build. Darwin Dimensions’ evolver promises to streamline this process significantly, using an innovative interface to give almost anyone the ability to quickly create fully rigged, production quality, digital humanoid characters.

evolver is a Windows XP-based application and consists of two main modules, the evolver Character Builder module, where you build and author your digital characters, and evolver Character Generator, which actually creates the fully rigged characters. The software is sold in three levels. evolver Basic ($39) consists of just the Character Builder module. Artists who purchase this module must send their characters to Darwin Dimensions, where they will be rendered for a fee. This is great for students and small studios who only need a few characters. evolver Pro ($4,995) adds the Character Generator module, allowing you to create and generate as many characters as you want. This option is great for studios who create a lot of characters. evolver Complete, the final level, is a future release that allows you to build and add in your own libraries of custom characters.

The software is quite fun to use. The Character Builder user interface is very simple and intuitive. Along the top of the interface is a series of “ancestors” that are used to virtually breed a new character. These ancestors are characters that span the basic archetypes of humans such as male, female, heavy, thin, Asian, African, and Caucasian. Some of the characters are extreme, some beautiful, some ghoulish. The interface allows you to select up to four ancestors, whose features can be mixed to create a final character. The software is OpenGL compliant, so you can spin and zoom your characters to see exactly how they will look when finished.

The Character Builder interface has two panels — the first panel is used to create heads, and the second is for bodies. When authoring heads, you have the ability to mix the four ancestors as well as individual body parts. If you want a different nose, for example, you can unlock the nose and select four more ancestors for just the nose. Eyes, lips, ears, and heads shape can also be adjusted separately. While this method works fairly well, it really only affects the overall shape of the features. I’d like to see a few more tools to give artists more direct manipulation of the facial features — such as scaling the lips to make them bigger or smaller, or moving the eyes together or further apart.

Once the basic shape of the head is determined, you can apply a texture to the character. The software has about a dozen different skin types, which are selected from a floating menu. The software does not allow you to mix skin textures, this could be a nice upgrade in a future version. The textures created by evolver are 4K in size, so they should work fine for anything, including features.