Documentation:Installing MakeHuman

MakeHuman can be downloaded here [1]. Later in the development life cycle, it might make sense to download nightly builds, which are found here: [2]. Nightly represent the latest developmental updates and are not guaranteed to be stable.

Currently, the latest release is MakeHuman 1.2.0. For version 1.2.0, you can go directly to [3] where you can find links for the release notes, the downloads for various platforms, and a list of know issues. If you are also a Blender user, the tools in this MakeHuman version are designed to to work with Blender 2.83 or later.

System Requirements

You will need about half a gigabyte of free disk space.

In order to use some realtime materials and obtain the best from the internal rendering engine, it's required an average quality graphic card, produced after the year 2006. In general, your graphics card should support OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) version 1.2 or above. There have been reports that the model colors are corrupted on some older Intel Graphics cards (often appearing blue and black). If you experience this, a possible work-around is to start MakeHuman™ with the "--noshaders" command line switch. On Windows, this switch can be added to your shortcut. See also FAQ:MakeHuman renders odd colours and weird transparency artefacts. Can you help me?

Windows 10/11

Download the zip file from the from the download page download page. From within Windows Explorer, double click the downloaded zip file, and click "Extract All" to extract the compressed files. When the extracted folder opens, double click "makehuman-community-1.2.0-windows.exe" to install the program. Allow installation on the dialog that pops up. Click Next.

Choose "Install for anyone using the computer" if you want all users of your computer to have access to MakeHuman; otherwise, choose "install for just me" and click Next. This choice will affect where MakeHuman assets are saved. If you choose "Install for just me", the default program location is: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\makehuman-community. If you choose "Install for all users", the default program location is: C:\Program Files\makehuman-community. Click Finish. There should be a shortcut to start MakeHuman on both the desktop and within the startup folder.

In all cases, MakeHuman related assets should by default be found in: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\makehuman\v1py3. Or, if you have OneDrive enabled, this may be" "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\OneDrive\Documents\makehuman\v1py3", instead.

If you are using Blender 2.83 or beyond, you may also wish to install some helpful plugins for using MakeHuman with Blender. Start Blender and choose, Edit | Preferences | Add-ons and click the Install button at the top. Navigate to the folder where you extracted the downloaded MakeHuman and go into the folder addons_for_blender_28x, click to select makehuman-plugins-for-blender.zip, makeclothes2.zip, makeskin.zip, and maketarget2.zip. Click Install Add-on. Click the check box to make this plugin available from within Blender. As desired, repeat the process for the makeclothes2.zip, the makeskin.zip, and the maketarget2.zip plugins. With the cursor over the Blender 3D viewport, press "N" to reveal tabs on the right side of the viewport for accessing these tools.

Mac OS X

Download the DMG file from the download page. Once downloaded, mount the disk image and drag the MakeHuman app into your Applications folder. MakeHuman supports Snow Leopard and newer.

Linux

At the point of writing this, the newest stable release is only available via PPA, see [4]. This should work on all debian derivatives. Other Linux distributions will need to run from source.

Installing from source

If you want to play around with the code, follow the latest development, or are having trouble with the prepackaged binaries you can run from a source clone from GitHub. This requires that you have installed python 3. and a set of other dependencies. See Documentation:Running_MakeHuman_from_source for more information.