DesignDoll

If you make a living out of art or you're just passionate about drawing, you might understand the importance of having a reliable source for references, both in the early stages of your artist days and later on, when you're already pretty skilled.

Although many artists advocate against using digital resources, claiming that "traditional" is better, nowadays there are some applications that might change their minds. DesignDoll is one of them.

Its name is pretty much suggestive; the program is a simulator for those wooden manikins some artists use for studying poses. You are presented with a doll that you can move however you like in order to study the shape of its body.

Moving the doll around is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Each joint has separate controls and if you want to control a specific segment of the doll you have to place your clicks in an accurate manner. If the segment doesn't move as you'd like, don't despair, just select another nearby segment and try again.

If you want to control only a certain segment of the doll's body, you can do so by using the diagram on the right part of the screen, which depicts a crudely shaped head, two gloves, a t-shirt, a pair of short pants and some shoes. Each of these icons represents a body part, which should be pretty clear.

You can also toggle a bunch of options in the same part of the screen if you want your model to be more realistic. For instance, you can enable a shoulder link, which automatically adjusts the shoulders whenever you move the arms and hands or you can toggle the "Auto Foot Correction" feature, which adjusts the feet according to the position of the legs and the ground.

If you're in need of a model to study human form and poses on, you might be in luck, since DesignDoll can do all of that, minus the costs needed to pay such a model. You can move it however you want, use different skins on it and even save it on your PC for future projects.