MakeHuman 1.0 alpha 5.1

Today we announce the release of MakeHuman 1.0 alpha 5.1. This is an intermediate release which fixes many of the bugs which are still present in the 5.0 release but which have been fixed for a long time in the Nightly. This release is identical to a recent nightly build, and is primaraly done in order to reduce the amount of time spent on giving support for already fixed bugs. Some elements will therefore have rough edges and some will be under construction, but it is a big improvement compared to alpha 5




Download: http://sites.google.com/site/makehumandocs/download
ChangeLog: http://sites.google.com/site/makehumandocs/changelog

Literature section on tuxfamily

I've made a directory for hosting books and articles about makehuman on tuxfamily. The first book hosted there is Thomas's book on how to make a video in two weeks.

Making a short movie with MakeHuman and Blender 2.5 in two weeks.

It might not be entirely obvious what the book is about. Just about everything that I have been doing in MakeHuman,

• MHX export from MakeHuman
  
• MHX import into Blender
  
• Mocap tool
  
• Lipsync tool
  

are tools for facilitating the use of MakeHuman characters in film-making with Blender. Some documentation is available in the Documents section, but it is not entirely up-to-date, and the mocap tool is not documented at all. The present text describes the tools above in the context of making a short movie. It does not just describe what each button does, but why it is there and how it is intended to be used. To make the text self-contained, there is also a discussion of some parts of Blender, like file linking and video sequencing, that are not so well known but absolutely essential for film-making.

Hence this text contains the most up-to-date documentation of the features listed above.

I also wanted to show that it is possible to use MHX export and the mocap tool to make an animated short very quickly. Despite the flaws in the animation and the shadows, I think that this point has been proved.

The book:
Download from RapidShare
Download from Hotfile
Download from MakeHuman



The movie:

The slithering python

Today we've done some structured work in trying to stomp out the "bag magic number" issue people have been running into when using windows. More in detail we have tried to replace all existing pre-compiled python modules with versions compiled with exactly 2.6.4, which is also the python version used to compile the windows nightly build.

I have now manually uploaded an extra "nightly" build, so these changes are online now.

If you have had problems with "bad magic number", please do the following:

• Remove all traces of prior versions of makehuman on your system
• For testing reasons, please uninstall all existing python versions (you can reinstall them later)
• Make really super mega sure you don't have a file called "python26.dll" or "python25.dll" anywhere on your system, including the windows folder
• Download and unzip the latest nightly build

As this is the version most up to date don't click the "update.bat" or download the .7z archive yet. You can follow the "smart update procedure" later on if the nightly build works for you now.