New MHX rig: Gobo

Over the past months I have become increasingly unhappy about the rig created upon Blender export. The problem is partly that I am not an experienced rigger, but also that rigging from a python script poses special challenges. In particular, the Blender 2.49 API has some annoying omissions (e.g. no pole targets for IK constraints) and bugs (copy rotation constraints always evaluated in world space), which means that you cannot make the same rigs from python that you can do in the viewport.

The new Blender 2.5 has a completely new API, which should make it possible to do everything in python that you can do in the viewport, although there are still some things to be desired (Campbell Barton: a systematic way to add elements to collections without using operators, please). I have therefore looked for Blender 2.5 rigs that can be used for MakeHuman. My first attempt was to try use the Rigify auto-rigging system described at http://durian.blender.org/news/rigify-auto-rigging-system/ . However, I don't really understand how to use it, so this project has been postponed.

Instead, I have used the Gobo rig created by Tobus Lieven, see http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=172128 . The two characters in the picture share the same rig, more or less. Some modifications were necessary to adapt the Gobo rig to MakeHuman (Gobo only has two fingers), and I renamed all bones to be able to reuse the weight painting from the old rig. The Gobo rig is still somewhat incomplete, but I believe that it is fundamentally sound, and a solid foundation for future improvements.


As of today, MH characters with the Gobo rig can imported into Blender 2.5. When we export a character called "foo" from MakeHuman, three mhx files are created: foo-24.mhx (the "classic" MH rig for Blender 2.49), foo-classic-25.mhx (the classic rig for 2.5) and foo-gobo-25.mhx (the Gobo rig for 2.5). Run the importers/mhx/blender25x/import-scene-mhx.py script in Blender 2.5; it finishes very quickly. Now choose File > Import > Makehuman (mhx) from the main menu, select the right mhx file from the file selector, and wait. After a while (quite a while), the Gobo-rigged character should appear.