Have you ever need a larger population of manikins for a scene?
I downloaded DAZ Studio 4.7 Pro Beta which is free at the moment.
It is very much like Poser and has some very sophisticated capabilities for a free offering.
Of course, a lot of it is a teaser, but what you get is fully functional.
What I found useful is the ability to make some pretty realistic manikins with expressions and gestures with a relatively intelligent interface.
You can pose them and morph them; dress them and manage them in countless ways.
And the great thing is, you can export them to an object file format and control how it scales and how how many features it creates in an intelligent manner!
Once you bring this into Creo, you have to save out each facet feature you want to assign a different color to. You re-assemble your object in an assembly all using the default origin. Now you have a color assigned to what DAZ 3D considers unique surfaces.
No texture mapping or color assignments come across in .obj files... and Creo won't let you do anything with facet files other than assign an overall color 
But, you can open the file, be it a person or a full scene, and you can save out many copies to be re-assembled. I included the child's head as a sample.
I included the model as it came in from the .obj format (childs_head.prt) and I turned off the cornea (needs to be translucent).
You can save this model as a .wrl (VRML) file and your new color assignment will remain, even if you import this as a new .prt file. Unfortunately, transparency won't and that is why the cornea is hidden.
Anyway, if you've been searching for a nice manikin generation tool, this might not be th eonly one, but it is an option and for now, it's free.
If you have another candidate tool to do this or some tips for preserving colors, or even texture maps with the import, that would be excellent!
Edit: due to my serious lack of artistry to create flesh tones on the fly, please find attached a color pallete based on this swatch:
http://m9.i.pbase.com/o2/50/88850/1/105147199.kNJ7Zwz1.Bruce_Beard_Skin_Color_Chart.jpg
This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.
"Have you ever needed a larger population of manikins for a scene?"
Hell yeah!
Dozen manikins and computer is choked.
A little work and Whallah! Somehow I found a tighter mesh out of DAZ 3D.
Still haven't found a way for Creo to understand the crease angle, but this is definitely better.
This is still a facet assembly with a few tricks to merge things the way I wanted to manage colors.
in short, a VRML (.wrl) export seems to take care of that.
If you open the .obj files, you can get lots of different surfaces. If you import (get data), you get a single surface. If you have the capabilities to manipulate point clouds, you can also strip a point cloud out of the various file types and create a .pts file.
What do you think?
DAZ 3D:
I guess I'm getting better at this. Learn something new every time.
The Scream was added to the original post.
When you add colors in the assembly, they do not translate tot he VRML file. If you intend to make a manikin as a part file through a VRML (.wrl) export, be sure to assign colors to each part rather than assembly appearance changes.
I attached the color file and the VRML import file to the attached file.
Also notice again that transparency is not preserved. I have hidden those items that need to be transparent. You can edit the model colors already specified including transparency, but you cannot assign new colors in the part file.
I have the bust models down to about 18 "layers"... 18 copies of the same file and deleting all but the focus part. Items such as the hair and the head should be consolidated and that was done with a quick VRML export and re-import. Full body will only add the nails and clothing. So fully dressed manikins can be managed with about 25 layers.
I've got this conversion down to just about 1-1/2 hours. A lot of repetition so some level of automation is certainly possible. Not to mention some levels of simplification.
