Documentation: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 [1].