I'm looking for a suggestion on a character design software. Sadly my requirements are pretty tight, so I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for so far.
I'm thinking on developing a small fantasy RPG game, but my greatest limit is that I'm totally unable to draw. I could ask someone else to draw for me, but I don't like the idea of depending on someone else, or simply involve someone else in a spare-time project that may as well die in a week.
I already found how to create maps, but I'm completely lost when it comes to designing characters. I looked around for some software that would help me, but it seems that everything I was able to find either needed me to draw everything, the result was pretty ugly and/or extremely limited, or the software was way too powerful for what I need.
To give an idea of what I have in mind as an ideal result, I found this image, but I can't find out how it was produced.
My requirements are:
- It should work on Linux. The ideal case is a software compiled specifically for Linux, but I can also accept something that can run under WINE (but I also need to know if it needs some special configuration through e.g Winetricks), or that can be installed in a virtual machine, if it's lightweight enough.
My computer is quite old and has some problems with the graphics drivers, so 3D rendering may not work that well.Edit: I bought a new computer in the meantime, so computational power is not a problem anymore. - It should give me a wide variety of possibilities, particularly fantasy-oriented (clothes, weapons, armor, shields, staves, ...) or the possibility to expand them in an easy way. Editing slightly existing images shouldn't be a great problem, if necessary. Creating them from scratch however is not really doable for me.
- It should produce not only human characters, but also things like elves, orcs, skeletons and such. If it can create quadrupedal and/or serpent-like creatures, or if you know of another software that can, it's a huge bonus, but that's not strictly necessary.
- The characters shouldn't be too realistic, I don't care much for things like nose shape, eye color and such. The image I posted above is almost exactly how I'd like to produce the characters. Reallusion's Character Creator for example is way too much, both in terms of results and hardware requirements.
- The output should be big enough. The Universal LPC Spritesheet Character Generator would be the really good, if the images weren't so small. Again, the image linked above is a good size, but if it can be bigger, it's even better.
- The game will be isometric, so ideally I need to be able to view the characters from 8 different directions, or at least from both the left and right side for the combat scenes. Kisekae (SFW) would be again pretty good, if it weren't for the fact that it only shows characters from the front. (and creating male characters is quite a pain, but that's something that I'd only have to solve once)
- It shouldn't be too complicated. Kisekae and the Universal LPC are good examples of what I look for in terms of complexity, Reallusion's CC is a good example of what I'm trying to avoid.
Of course the requirements should not be taken too strictly, this is just what I consider ideal, but I can survive a suboptimal solution, if necessary. :D
Thanks in advance for the help!
