Ara 3D Gen

Open-source, self-hosted generator for realistic 3D human characters: rigged, animated and ready for your engine.

Ara is Yoruba for "body". Easy to run, free to use, no limits.

▶ Try it online: ara3dgen.com, or self-host it (below).

Shape a body, dress it, give it hair, a beard, tattoos and a weapon, pick from 84 animations, and export GLB, FBX, OBJ or a ZIP bundle. It runs entirely on your machine, in the browser or headless from the command line, with no accounts, credits or limits.

Why self-hosted?

Online character generators are convenient, but you rent them. Ara 3D Gen is yours:

	Online platforms	Ara 3D Gen
Cost	Subscriptions, credits or per-export fees	Free, MIT-licensed
Limits	Monthly export or generation caps	Unlimited, as many characters as your machine can make
Privacy	Your projects live on someone's server	Nothing leaves your computer
Offline	Needs an internet connection	Works offline once set up
Automation	Usually a web UI only, sometimes a paid API	Scriptable CLI and a TypeScript API: generate hundreds of NPCs in a loop
Ownership	Licence terms can change or restrict use	CC0 base assets and free motion capture: use exports commercially, no attribution
Customisation	What the vendor ships	Fork it: add garments, hairstyles, animations, presets, export rules
Longevity	The service can shut down or change pricing	The code and your pipeline stay with you

Features

• Realistic humans: built on the CC0 MakeHuman dataset: 900+ morph targets, 219 detail sliders, 20 photo-based skins across age, ethnicity and sex, three detail levels (≈5k to 120k triangles).
• Quick build: a guided mode where you tap options (body, heritage, 28 outfit styles, colours, hair, extras, an action) and watch the character update. Plain-words summary, undo, Surprise me, and every unavailable option explains why. Detailed has every slider.
• 30 presets: including the Female Executive, Miami Dealer, Gangster, Priest, Corporate High-Flier, Prison Escapee, Arabian Oil Tycoon and Adventurer. Plus one-click, reproducible random characters.
• Clothing: MakeHuman outfits, or mix-and-match tops, bottoms, wrappers, uniforms and 30+ accessories. Generated fabrics (kente, aso-oke, ankara, adire, camo, leather…), all recolourable.
• Hair and looks: MakeHuman hairstyles plus buzz cut, punk mohawk, cornrows and box braids. Stubble, mustache, goatee and beards. Tattoos. Earrings.
• Faces that come alive: blinking and glances, 9 expressions with teeth and tongue, a talking clip and lip-sync mouth shapes, exported as blend shapes.
• Auto-rigging: game rig (Mixamo bone names; Unity Humanoid / Unreal / Mixamo compatible), lite or full skeleton, A- or T-pose, optional face bones, a WeaponR socket.
• 84 animations: a motion-captured walk, model walk (catwalk) and run, turns, jumps, pickup, press, open door, push, carry idle/walk, sitting and lying, combat, emotes, a full shooter set, melee and vehicles, with optional root motion. What you see in the preview is what you export.
• Props: a rifle, pistol, sword and knife on the socket (exported in the hand or as separate props), and a bicycle fitted to every rider.
• Exports you can trust: an export panel that lists every file before you download it: static, rigged, or rigged + animations; one file or one per clip; Unity model@clip and Godot loop naming.
• Share: a branded image of your character, a caption and a link that rebuilds the exact character in the app (no server or account needed).
• Ara Studio (early preview): open your character in /studio/, search 50 categorized sets, direct up to five characters with 84 animations, orbit the scene, add subtitles or comic bubbles that follow characters, and add typed, recorded or uploaded speech with voice effects, timed sound effects and nine recorded music options. Export a 720p or 1080p MP4 with sound. Studio guide.

Quick start

Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Requirements: Node 20+ and git.

git clone https://github.com/olatunde85/3d-gen.git
cd 3d-gen
npm install
npm run setup-assets   # one-time: downloads CC0 MakeHuman data (~420 MB) and builds public/assets (~85 MB)
npm run dev            # open http://localhost:5173 (landing page; the app is at /app/)

Already cloned it? Update with git pull, npm install, then npm run setup-assets (about a minute; it reuses your downloads). Building, deploying and the command line are covered in Self-hosting.

Documentation

The full guides live in docs/, also at ara3dgen.com/docs:

• Self-hosting: install, update, build, deploy, command line, tests
• Using characters in your engine: Unity, Unreal, Godot, Blender and the web
• Bodies, clothing and looks · Faces, expressions and lip-sync · Animations
• Rigging · Exporting · Architecture
• Ara Studio: short films with up to five characters, dialogue, sound and music

Questions and showcases: Discussions. Bugs and ideas: Issues. What changed in each version: Releases.

Licensing

• Code: MIT.
• Studio music: nine recorded tracks supplied for Ara, compressed and loudness-matched with FFmpeg. Creator/source credits ship in media/music/CREDITS.txt; music retains its own rights and is not covered by the code licence.
• Studio speech tools: optional local Supertonic 2 voices use separately downloaded OpenRAIL-M model files; ONNX Runtime Web is MIT. Native device voices are available for read-throughs. Notices ship in third-party/speech/; see the Studio guide.
• Studio video tools: Mediabunny is MPL 2.0. Static builds include its licence and original source in third-party/mediabunny/; see the Studio guide.
• Character data: MakeHuman assets, CC0 1.0 (public domain); see scripts/ASSETS_LICENSE.txt. They are downloaded by setup-assets, not stored in this repository.
• Motion capture: the captured clips come from the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database: free to use, including in commercial products, but the data may not be resold on its own. The data used in this project was obtained from mocap.cs.cmu.edu. The database was created with funding from NSF EIA-0196217. The retargeted clips are baked into src/core/anim/clips/mocap-data.ts by npm run build-mocap (takes are listed in scripts/mocap-takes.ts).
• Your exports: yours. Use them in commercial and non-commercial projects without attribution.

Contributing

Garments, hairstyles, animations, presets, engine notes, docs and bug reports are all welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Roadmap

See the open issues, for example more animations (interaction, dodge and roll, carrying) in #1 and face capture with Apple's 52 ARKit shapes in #11.