MH vs Python 3 Progress

Our work on porting the MakeHuman source code to Python 3 is progressing nicely, but we still have a long way to go before all the known bugs and hidden bugs are all cleaned up.

If you are an artist with limited interest in programming or technical details, you may (rightly) ask, “Who cares?”. This is especially true when you learn that the process will produce no new features. The short answer is that we are making an investment in our future. The longer explanation is that MakeHuman currently runs on top of Python 2.7, and the Python developers have announced the end of active develop for Python 2.7. To secure a solid development environment for MakeHuman's future, we must update its source code to run on top of Python 3.

How far along are we? The Python 3 port of MakeHuman now fully boots on both MS Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux 16.04. There are still known issues with shading, smoothing, and armatures, etc, but it is great to see how much of the basic functionality is already working normally.

If there are any technical users on the Mac platform, we'd love to get feedback on whether the start-up process reaches completion on Mac Os X yet. The source code for the Python 3 version is available on the community GitHub: https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman_python3  

In the meantime, we hope you are finding the many features of the current MH 1.1.0 release useful in achieving your artistic goals.