Two new low-poly meshes

One unexpected benefit of my poor proxy mesh was that it triggered contributions from others. Two talented artists have made low-poly meshes, far better than mine. They have now been brought into MH, and are exported, both in the mhx file and as separate obj files. For the moment, only one of the meshes can be imported into Blender 2.49.

The meshes have been named after the contributors' user names in the forum. The proxy meshes are quite different, and I imagine that both can be useful. My own low-poly mesh has also been removed, missed by nobody. Some characteristics of the two meshes:

Rorkimaru:
* Very low poly
* Quads
* Two fingers and a mit
* Disconnected body parts, originally, but I seem to have changed that when I brought the mesh in MH.
* UV coordinates

forsaken:
* Medium poly count
* Triangles
* Five fingers
* Follows high-poly mesh closely, including inside mouth.
* No UV coordinates, at least not yet.



Adding your own proxy mesh
Black Moderate asks how make a proxy mesh of your own. I will describe how to make it, but currently the only way make MakeHuman recognize it is to overwrite one of the existing proxy definitions. If you do that, make sure to back up your own file before you download MH again, because it will be overwritten.

The definition of the two current proxies are located in the files forsaken.proxy and Rorkimaru.proxy in the data/templates/ folder. The files consist of several sections:

Mesh without UVs:
1. Association of proxy verts with original verts.
2. Proxy faces, as in an obj file without UVs.

Mesh with UVs:
1. Association of proxy verts with original verts.
2. Proxy UV coordinates.
3. Proxy faces, as in an obj file with UVs.

A vertex in the proxy mesh simply inherits everything from its parent vert in the original mesh: morph targets, vertex weights, shapekeys, etc.

How to make a new proxy mesh:

1. Import the default mesh into Blender (a recent build of 2.5!) and rename it "Human"
2. Import your proxy mesh, or make one with the retopo tools. It must be called "Proxy".
3. Run the script utils/mhx/defineProxy.py. I just committed it to svn, so it will be there in tomorrow's nightly build. The variable path at the end of the script is your output file.
4. The script creates a proxy file without UVs.

To add UVs:

1. Export your proxy mesh as obj.
2. Delete the Faces section of the proxy file.
3. Copy the tex verts (lines that start with vt) and faces (lines that start with f) from the obj file into you proxy file.
4. Insert the line "TexVerts" before the first vt and "Faces" before the first f.
5. Delete all vt's and f's.
6. Compare with Rorkimuru's file to see how it should look.

How to improve vertex association

The algorithm works by associating a proxy vertex to its closest neighbor in the original mesh. Unfortunately, it becomes confused in areas where the original mesh has overlapping parts. The mouth area is especially nasty, but also the eyes and lips can cause problems. To assist the algorithm, you can assign vertex groups to both the proxy and the original mesh, e.g. to the upper/lower teeth, upper/lower gum, tounge and body. The program will then assign the closest vertex in the correct vertex group.