Recruiting for Makehumans Future!

[punkduck]

Okay, I am back from Canada, where I worked for a while with Elv. Of course, I detected lots of problems, since I had no Linux there and at home I rarely work with Windows when I develop something.

Sometimes Windows is odd. E.g. the 3d Viewer accepts extra textures via URI names in glTF, as long as they do not contain an "_" in the filename... and yes, the idiots who invented this viewer wanted to show us the wonderful world having never problems on a windows box. No error message anywhere, not even in a log file. Simply the bee is displayed. Yes that helps ... thank you, MS.

I will add the possibility to binary attach the textures and hope that will work. In the end I was able to at least show the character in that viewer, of course not the animation. But since the viewer does not really cope with multi-transparent meshes, it is more or less nice to have, if that works. Blender was okay with it, Unreal looked okay. But I will change a few things still, so that the Khronos evaluator will be happier (there is sth incorrect with the bone order, I guess, but in Blender it works fine).

Other things: I added a double click for the button to directly add clothes and some other smaller changes. Atm I also added a new branch for MakeTarget in github. Because we now have the possibility to work with different meshes. Mostly it works identical, but of course not always. Btw. Why should a character always be symmetric? So I changed that today in MakeTarget. The MakeClothes version I did not yet change, but it will be changed as well. Both versions will work with MakeHuman V1 and V2, so no worries.

Elv created a robot as a mascot and demo character. Meanwhile we can use targets and assets (clothes) on that guy. A skeleton will be added soon. Also some animations etc.

targets on our bot

Here are some clothes, so a jet-pack, there will be more. This bot comes with the standard version, so it is "included" when you load it from github.

Clothes ...

Btw.: it might be more reasonable to switch off some buttons... like tongue, eyelashes, which that bot will definitely not have.

Some remarks: Background rendering I rewrote but it only shows some effects on Linux. There is still a lot to do. But we should start with tests from our members soon. I only will find the problems, which I expect. A typical problem of programmers.

Greetings
punkduck

[Elvaerwyn]

Greetings,

Looks great, and glad you followed advice for double clicking as that is a big part of how my workflow works, and many others as well

Btw did I forget to give you the file with the other attachments?

Elv

[punkduck]

Hi

The assets were complete, but last time, I was not yet ready. A few meshes I got from Elv had to be changed to clothes and they needed small texture. Meanwhile the second example character, the mh2bot, is more or less complete.
Since the assets and textures uses space, more should not be uploaded to github, we should supply this later on our own file servers, if we will add textures and assets for the bot. Just to have a convincing examples and not just a uni-colored white asset I tried to do tiny 5k textures.

By the way, new makehuman can deal with small textures for assets with even a minimal texture size of 1x1 pixel. This kind of texture is internally used to create uni-color objects.

So meanwhile I figured out what was still missing to use the other menues in MakeHuman2 like skeleton, expression- and pose-editor and selection of expressions for a different character instead of the hm08 one.
The skeleton for that guy is simple. All weights are mostly 1 since one bone just changes one part of the bot.

Since that bot only has a few bones for the face, there are just a few examples in the expression selection. Expression editor only has a few sliders though. I also added one pose and a small animation. The pose editor itself is quite similar to the one of hm08.

It is not complicated to create extra sliders in both editors, it is done by body-poses.json and face-poses.json. There will be a description later how to create these files. You may have a look here:
https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman-pyside6/tree/main/data/base/mh2bot

With the pose editor I created the overlay, that the guy could grab the oil can and the bicycle horn by changing the 3 "fingers" and the hands of the idle animation.

Menues for eyebrows and teeth will no longer appear, when a character is not supposed to have this equipment. Each individual base.json file now contains the asset-categories, so clothes, hair, eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, teeth, tongue and proxy for hm08, for the mh2bot it is only clothes atm.

test for a second base character

Now I need to do fixes ... especially offscreen rendering is buggy. On Windows there is nothing, on Linux there are some glitches for transparent layers, especially transparent clothes create a transparent body if I render on a transparent background
Meanwhile glTF deals with binary textures embedded, so no bee anymore more when a texture name contains a "_" in the microsoft viewer. But animations are not yet visible. A few other things I will add, but we slowly reach the state of a beta version,

Greetings
punkduck

[punkduck]

Hi,

I am working on a few animations, which will be included as special assets for makehuman version II. Therefore I changed the floor, which was mainly used for debugging of walking animations.
It can be resized now and also made thicker. When transparent the floor is useful to simulate water. So one can create an origin for a later animation to be below the floor. It is not yet 100% but the animation itself looks pretty good. A few different skyboxes and floors will be available as assets as well.

floor as water

here is the animation

crawlstroke.mp4

crawlstroke animation

(6.09 MiB) Downloaded 14 times

Greetings
Punkduck

[Ricardo2020]

This is mighty nice in terms of the way she moves through the water, the way the bones of the rig move. Very realistic, indeed.

It is really going to be great when we can animate the hair and the water, but those things are probably outside the scope of current developement and best left to being done in Blender. Hair and water motion needs a lot of compute to get the physics right, and most folks are not going to have the hardware which is powerful enough to pull that off. And then there is the ray tracing thing, which needs even more compute and a GPU that can do the traces.

I am currently benching with a new box I just built which has a 4GHz Skylake i7, 32GB of 2133MHz DDR4 and a PNY Quadro RTX4000 GPU. It is almost complete but the case it is in is temporary. The system will eventually be put into a 4U server chassis for better cooling and more drive bays. The machine can ray trace in real time, so Blender should be able to do Cycles quite well. Even then, animating hair and water might be more than it can handle. Most people are not running this kind of stuff and the need to keep things light is a must if we are to get a lot of folks on board with the new standalone version.

So far, I have not been able to get the PySide 6 version of the program to run on my main workstation, a similarly equipped box built from slightly older kit. I think this is due to missing dependancies. Once I migrate to the latest version of Linux Mint, I plan to explore this further. Right now I am running Mint 22.1 (Xia). The latest version is 22.2 (Zara). Plans are to leave this rig as it is and do the experimenting on the newer machine with the RTX card since my main workstation has a much older GTX 960.

[punkduck]

Hi

Well the water surface is just for determination of the origin of an animation. It is not meant to be a new Blender. Maybe you remember that there is mostly a "feet on ground" checkbox for the exporters. For swimming this results in an odd position (it is not really feet on ground, it is more or less the lowest vertex). I will try to have at least one pipeline to export to Godot/Unity/Unreal via glTF without the need of using Blender in between. That is e.g. the reason why I switched to more common textures like metal-roughness and AO map at the moment, these ones are used in game-engines. AO map in Blender does not make too much sense, at least not in cycles.

Hair is something, where you have at least 3 methods:

1. Mesh hair. Maybe even rigged. This is our standard in MakeHuman1 and 2. Usually made from polygons (triangles or quads)
2. Strand hair. Made from polygonal chains, rendered with a certain thickness. Classically they best work with collision objects and some kind of hair motion calculated. Also works in game engines (alembic import), but of course might create funny effects, when your character is very fast. Here are some limits, where a game engine needs to simplify a bit.
3. Haircards, These are also polygons, but used different. They would work in Makehuman. But classical would be designed somewhere else and then be exported. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hYhLa_3bss
   Maybe also animated like the classical wind effects in e.g. Unreal Engine (using a changing displacement while rendering).

The only thing I may add in future will be the support of jiggle-effects of bones + shape-keys. But that is still not yet in focus. Next will be an upload of extra-assets which are still missing (esp. litspheres etc), I just got access.

Your box should already work with MakeHuman2 ... I even have it running on a Ubuntu 20. If it does not work, there is usually sth. with PyOpenGL vs. PySide6 ... and there should be error messages when you start it from the CLI.

Greetings
Punkduck

[tomcat]

1. For animation, this work can be considered.

https://mesh2motion.org/

Unfortunately, my suggestion for a standalone version was not supported.

https://github.com/scottpetrovic/mesh2m ... iscussions

2. As a rule, it is useful to have Blender as a standardization stage for game assets loaded into the engine. But the ability to export directly is a nice feature.

3. The implementation of hair depends heavily on the target platform—Blender or a game engine (the implementation can vary greatly between different engines).