Is there any free animated human body model for a beginner?

[progmars]

Hi all!
I have played a bit with Ogre3d and moved some boxy robots around. And I think I am ready to step further.

I have involved a friend in all those Ogre3d things and he is excited too, so we will try to make something together. Mostly the idea is to have some virtual world where anything is possible ("anything" depends on how fast we will be learning Ogre3d and add-on libraries ).

You know that modeling a good, natural looking body with animations (but not too complicated so to be able to render it realtime) is really complicated task for a beginner.

We are planning to have only humanoid characters and we are looking for a good starting point - a human model with bone system and some basic animations like walk, run, sit, and also facial animations support would be great.

Of course, there are some models available free, but we do not have enough experience to evaluate which one is more appropriate to be used in Ogre3d.

So if you have found a good free human model (better dressed than naked, and the file format should be what is recognized by most of 3d software because we have not chosen any tool yet) that could help us to get a base for developing our own characters, we would be really grateful for your suggestions. The most valuable would be models which are out-of-the-box ready for Ogre3d engine.

Thanks.

[jacmoe]

The best resource I know of is the WorldForge media repository:

If you need free resources I can recommend taking a look at the Worldforge Media Repository. We have over 4Gb of textures, meshes, sounds etc. licensed under the GPL. (And just to clarify: using GPL media in your app won't require your app to be licensed under the GPL too.)

Instructions on how to access it can be found here: http://worldforge.org/media/documents/media_faq
A simple browsable interface can be found here: http://purple.worldforge.org/repositories/svn/
A more advanced, WIP and sometimes very slow interface can be found here: http://amber.worldforge.org/media/media ... .php?dir=/

And some screenshot of how the media looks can be found here: http://amber.worldforge.org/ember/screenshots/

Almost all meshes are available in Ogre mesh and skeleton format, and for most textures we also provide normal, specular and sometimes ambient occlusion maps.

[progmars]

Thanks, jacmoe for the useful info. We will try some of the bodies I found at WorldForge.

[Azatoth]

Thanks jacmoe for the promo!

@progmars: For humanoid meshes you probably want to look in 3d_skeletons/bipeds. We're developing a new media browser tool called Wombat which can be found here that might be useful for browsing.
If you have any questions, we're usually online in irc evenings GMT, and we have a forum.

And if you're on a linux box you can try the newly released version 0.5.5 of Ember to see some of the meshes in use. (No win32 binaries yet, we're working on it.)