Real life appearance to Blender

I’m not that good at creating models from scratch… especially texturing them. I have however been interested in obtaining rigged characters that look as closely as possible to people in real life. Obviously that includes myself first of all… though I might someday make animations where other people are included if they want that.

So I was wondering if there are any blend files or templates of rigged human characters, that can be easily adjusted to look like anyone in real life. Facial traits could be configured via shape keys for example, while limb length and age via scaling certain bones, whereas skin color can be defined by material color, and so on. Anyone ever made something like that?

MakeHuman? Human zBuilder for Max? Species for SoftImage? Those are the only three similar things I can think of off the top of my head. MakeHuman is definitely the most accessible, and provides pre-rigged models in a Blender format (although the skinning kind of sucks by default).

Aha! I heard about Makehuman a lot, but thought it’s a Blender addon that automatically rigs your characters. I see that it’s a project of its own now, and indeed a full character creation tool. From what I understand also, the resulting character mesh is CC0 / PD, which is even better! It’s probably what I will try out first… thanks for the help.