Proxy mesh

Since it is that time of the year, I have hidden a little easter egg in the mhx files: a low-poly proxy mesh. Since the proxy weighs in at around 1,500 verts and the real MakeHuman mesh is ten times as heavy, the proxy can be used when speed is more important than quality, e.g. for animation in the viewport and quick test renders. It is probably not good enough for use in games though, at least not without modification.

The proxy mesh is built from a subset of the original verts, connected by a new set of faces. I tried both to make the mesh pure quad and to maintain edge loops, but at the end I didn't quite succeed with either. There are also too many verts on the torso and too few around the nose, and highly curved areas such as the fingers and teeth tend to shrink when the number of verts is reduced. Proxy verts inherit weights and shapekeys from its parent verts in the original mesh, so the proxy can be posed and use shapekeys just as the original mesh, although the result is not always what you expect.

There are three new options in the MHX import script: Mesh, Armature and Proxy. They determine what parts of the mhx file are loaded into Blender. The main reason for deselecting the mesh is performance: loading it consumes a lot of time and memory. Deselecting the armature also deselects vertex groups associated with bones, leaving only a few groups that have other purposes.

Loading the proxy mesh has some quirks. In Blender 2.49, the normals are not consistent. To fix that, recalculate all normals (select proxy, Tab, A, Ctrl-N, A, Tab) (Now fixed). In Blender 2.5, the first material is SSS_skinshader, which should be replaced by ProxySkin from the dropdown menu. This is probably a weird Blender bug.

Hopefully the proxy mesh can be useful for somebody. At least I had fun making it.

Update: A proxy obj file is now generated on obj export.