Human Reference Images
I have been looking around for good creative commons reference images of the human body. ultimately i just want, front, back and side shots of a male and female. one would have thought this would be quite easy, but it appears no such thing exists.
One would think it would be right up Wikimedia's alley, however this is as close as Wikimedia gets:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Human_body_diagrams
I have plenty of internal anatomy imagery
http://biodidac.bio.uottawa.ca/
http://anatquest.nlm.nih.gov/AnatQuest/index.html
and there is a commercial site that caters to just this sort of thing:
however it is not free and its images can not be used under an open source licence.
So as far as I can tell, us open source artists are a bit snookered in terms of even the most basic reference material.
There are various drawing references, that show comic human outlines and proportions, however they aren't realistic, and certainly couldn't be used as textures:
http://www.idrawdigital.com/tag/proportions/
Am I going to have to take naked photos of my friends? Surely some university somewhere has done this already?
What I've resorted to doing is using MakeHuman to create a high-poly mesh of whatever height, build, etc., that I need, and then use that as a reference or tracing the outlines/contours. It's a GPL program for (at least) the three big operating systems and allows the user to customize the character in a lot of ways using a simple interface. It exports the mesh as an obj file, so you can import that into Blender and pose it however you like, so really it's an awesome reference for anatomy.
http://makehuman.org