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Application Preferences & Info

The Preferences Sidebar​

The Preferences sidebar is the second tab from the bottom of the sidebar, which is available on the left side of the screen. From this tab you can adjust Mannequin Character Generator's various settings.

User Interface​

In this section, you can switch Mannequin Character Generator's user interface theme between Light or Dark. You can enable Only Allow 1 Expanded Sidebar Panel to make every panel in a sidebar auto-close when other is opened. You can also toggle Disable UI Animation to disable any animation in the user interface, providing instant response to your input.

If you are using a lot of mods and/or making a mod yourself, using Enable Developer Mode will add more functionality aimed at easier content development. Lastly, you can choose between showing all of the available content (Default Library + all downloaded DLCs and mods) or just the Default Library only when opening the Library Window (where you usually browse for templates).

New File Defaults​

In this section, you can change Mannequin Character Generator's behavior when creating a new file: Whether it will Always Ask for parameters or Use Settings Below which you can adjust further. The interface of this section is largely similar to the new file dialog window.

Custom Library Locations​

You can manage multiple locations from which Mannequin Character Generator will scan for additional content. Currently there are two default locations pre-programmed into the app. First is the /dlc subfolder inside the installation directory, in which all of default DLCs are located. Second is the itch.io default app installation folder which is used for better compatibility with the itch.io platform. This folder is located in different places depending on your OS:

  • C:\Users\[yourUserName]\AppData\Roaming on Windows (Vista and up)
  • /home/user/.local/share on Linux
  • /Users/[yourUserName]/Library/Preferences on macOS

You can click Add to add more folders into the list. Remove each folder by clicking Remove Location, or remove all of them by clicking Reset. You can also browse each folder contents by clicking Browse in Explorer/Finder/File Manager. After adding or removing folders from this list, you can use the Refresh button to force Mannequin Character Generator re-scan all of the libraries in the listed folders.

Quick Palettes (Skin, Hair, Iris and Clothing)​

From this section, you can list your favorite colors which will appear on the right side of the color picker. Each category will affect different color picker. Colors listed in the Skin Color Quick Palette, for example, will only show up in the color picker when you are changing skin colors.

Performance Tweaks​

From this section, you can adjust several performance-related options to optimize Mannequin Character Generator's speed and/or memory usage.

Caching is used for faster rendering in the editor window. When this option is enabled, component images are kept in the memory so the app does not need to read data from storage multiple times. As a drawback, changes made to the component image files won't show up if the corresponding image is already cached into memory. This can be detrimental if you're a developer making custom components, so enable or disable it depending on your current circumstances.

Render Processes is the amount of processes that Mannequin Character Generator will use at the same time to render images. As you might already know, the art used by Mannequin Character Generator is vector-based, therefore a big part of it relies a lot on the CPU. This value is set to the thread count of your CPU at the first launch of the app. For example, if your computer has a dual-core processor with Hyper-Threading/SMT then the default value will be 4. Reducing this amount will result in lesser memory consumption and slower rendering times.

Undo Limit is the maximum amount you can undo actions in the app. Setting a high amount will make the app remember more actions and therefore uses more memory.

GPU Acceleration is used to help render images on the screen through the assistance of your system's graphics card (either discrete or onboard). If you are experiencing black squares or artifacting, disabling this might help although at the cost of reduced rendering performance.