MB-Labs is the open source successor to Manuel Bastioni Labs, which was sadly abandoneed by it’s creator. The team behind MB-Lab have done an excellent job of picking up development of this powerful open source Blender powered character creator. MB-Lab 1.7.8 is available for download with complete release notes right here.
Of perhaps most importance to game developers however is this announcement from BlenderNation describing the new character tools, enabling game developers to create assets that aren’t limited by the AGPL license.
This release introduces the ability to create your own characters for MB-Lab, something that has been requested since the beginning of MB-Lab. These new tools have been in development for almost 8 months and with these tools users (and developers) can build new characters with restriction free licensing (if they choose to do so) so that they can be used in commercial games among other things. While this release does not bring in new “official” characters yet, the tools are there for everyone to use, as well as contribute to. The documentation is being worked on currently so that users can understand the process of building a character in Blender to be used with MB-Lab. Word of warning is that these tools may contain bugs, the tools have been tested but there may be unforeseen errors that we developers just have not come across yet.
We go hands-on with MB-Labs in the video below, showcasing how you install and use this powerful character creation add-on.