Proxy configuration and administration

ascottk has contributed yet another proxy mesh. It is a nice quad mesh with the same uv layout as the original mesh. Hence you can use the same textures for both the high- and low-poly meshes.

With three low-poly meshes around, it becomes necessary to introduce some way to administrate them. Including all of them in every export both takes time and disk space, to no avail; I doubt that anybody wants more than one low-poly version of each character.

Which proxy meshes that will be included in the mhx file / exported as obj files is defined in the file proxy.cfg at the makehuman top level. The file simply lists the file paths to the proxy definitions to be included. Lines that start with a # are comments which are ignored. This is in svn now and hence in tomorrow's nightly build.

MakeHuman will also look for proxy.cfg in your home folder. Unlike what I thought, the home folder on Windows is not My Documents, but rather one level above it. As a second choice, MakeHuman also looks for this file at your computer's top level, i.e. C: on Windows.

I have started to write a description on how to create your own proxy definition file. So far the page differs little from the addendum to my previous blog post, but updated information will go there. Once the low-poly mesh is available, creating the proxy file is largely done by a script, but some manual tweaking is necessary for good results.

With so many low-poly meshes available, and others perhaps in the making, it is not clear to me whether all should be included by default in the MH distribution, or if we should set up some site where artists can share proxy files. Such a site could be used to share other resources as well.