R.S. Riekkinen: Some alternative resources for creating character refs: Hero Forge (free) Picrew character creators (free) Dress-up & doll maker games (free) Photos, photo collages & mood boards (free) Self-drawn doodles (free) RPG character creators (Dragon's Dogma 2, BG3 etc) Character image packs by creatives

If you commission art, please refrain from using genAI to generate ref images. Because at the end of the day, any usage of exploitative AI directly supports the plagiaristic AI companies and their exploitation/theft of creative labor. There are so many ethical options you can use to create refs.

Some alternative resources for creating character refs: Hero Forge (free) Picrew character creators (free) Dress-up & doll maker games (free) Photos, photo collages & mood boards (free) Self-drawn doodles (free) RPG character creators (Dragon's Dogma 2, BG3 etc) Character image packs by creatives

The references don't need to be "fancy" to be highly functional and informative. A self-drawn doodle with descriptive text is often far more informative than an inaccurate A/I image.

Posemy.art lets you use dome of their 3d models directly on their website for free Openverse.org is a search that shows you license-free images (unfortunately recently slughtly infested with some genAI but has a report feature)

PoseMy.Artposemy.art Create figure drawing reference with this free character posing tool. Pose 3D models with premade animations to create dynamic pose reference for your art.

My absolute favourite references clients give me are stickfigures and random doodles It really doesn't have to be drawn 100% flawless, just some "here's an eye and the scar is a bit like this" is perfect for example

Yup this! Simple stick figures and doodles are often very informative. And it is so much better than receiving an A/I image with a wonky/inaccurate design or an A/I-generated character that is very close to being a rip-off of a character from an existing IP for example

yes!!! i love a stick figure ref from clients SO much, it’s really fun to work from them and expand on the vision

the Sims 4 is really good for this, and the base game is free iirc

I'm a huge fan of 'face claims' - the last commission I got from a friend, they had a few video game screenshots (also a good character ref too!) and then went 'x actress is her face claim'. Perfect!! I have a whole wealth of images of how you want them to look now!

Can not stress Hero Forge enough. Hell, really miss Gaia's knockoff avatar planner, Tektek.

I’ll throw in VR Chat/Unity avatars/resources and a texture editor like the open source art program Krita. Since it’s Unity you can model them pretty easily with a customized background. This was taken inside VRChat in a world that supports it but it’s easy enough to just use Unity

I've linked it to where I start looking at different character creators. youtu.be/Id3fKlxLMzE?...

Digital Character Creators and Commissioning Artistsyoutu.be Just me quickly showcasing some character creating software I use for making references with artists. This video is posted under fair use laws as a commentary on the video game and a showcasing on methods of clearing each section.

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