As a lone developer, I find one of the most hardest parts of prototyping a new game is creating the player's character model.
I can whip up simple static programmer art - walls, chairs, crates, trash cans, simple tanks, guns, etc but I cannot make a somewhat barely recognizable 3d representation of a human for the life of me - let alone animate one so it walks or holds a gun.
In have briefly encountered XNA on Xbox 360, and I loved being able to call:
AvatarDescription avatarDescription = AvatarDescription.CreateRandom();
and quickly populate my world with random characters of all shapes and sizes that can walk, run, crawl, etc. I love the simplicity of the Xbox Avatars - and I have seen many indie games on XBLA use avatars mixed in with simple programmer art that still looks polished while allowing the developer to focus on other aspects of the game.
I would love the ability to do a similar thing on the PC. Does such an SDK or library exist for the PC?
I'm not talking about a full on character customization system, just a quick CreateRandom() equivalent to populate my game worlds with. If there isn't, how do you populate your game world characters when you don't have the art resources/talent to do so?
