New manual

Since there have been many complaints about the old manual being outdated, I wrote a new one to address this. It was written in roughly a day, but will be continuously updated together with the software. You can download it here for now: MakeHuman: A manual.

Catmull-Clark subdivision

One of the new features this week is a new subdivision algorithm. Before we had loop subdivision because we worked with triangles internally. Since this year I moved all the code to quads because it takes less data, less processing and our model is mostly quads anyway.
In previous alphas of makehuman 1.0 the subdivision was only used when rendering, although you could see the subdivided mesh with the undocumented alt-s keystroke.
In the svn version and the next alpha, the scope of subdivision has been considerably extended. The wavefront object and stereolithography exporters have an option to export the subdivided mesh instead of the default resolution mesh. People with enough computing power can work with the new smooth view, which allows you to see the subdivision mesh during most of the workflow. Currently updating the subdivision mesh still takes too much time to use it during real-time modifications, so while moving sliders, the mesh temporarily switches to the default resolution and switches back to high resolution once the slider is released. We hope to remove this limitation in the future.
If you are a person in need of a smooth high resolution mesh for rendering and you are adventurous you can try a nightly build or build yourself from svn, but remember that these are not guaranteed to work or even launch since the trunk is under continuous development.

Nightly builds down over weekend

This is just a quick announcement that nightly builds for windows and linux will be down over the weekend while I migrate the build machines to the new virtualization server. With some luck the builds will start to update properly again on monday at the latest.

EDIT: Nightlies work on my side now, but we seem to have run into the quota roof on tuxfamily. I'm not sure how to proceed with this.

Makehuman Development Calendar

I just made our google calendar public. Currently I'm the only one writing my tasks there, but this is editable by our major developers:




Edit: I could not embed the calendar in the blog.. blogger has some issues with sizes. So I'll just show the link

The link to the calendar is here.

New hair grouping tutorial and a note on Blender's .obj importer

Unfortunately we just found a bad behaviour in Blender's .obj importer for nurb (curves). Either that or I have not figured out Blender's .obj importer/exporter correctly. Here is the difference:



So what's going on? Well makehuman saves and loads hairs Wavefront .obj file as cubic curves. But Blender's importer adds one order to the original curve's order in the .obj file. So if I defined my .obj file as a cubic curve it loads and displays it as a quadric curve and if I have a quadratic curve it displays it as a cubic curve. And apparently the exporter saves the hair correctly (it saves a cubic curve displayed in blender as cubic). But then when you import the saved hair (from Blender) you get a curve of a higher order than the original one saved in Blender.

Ok... that was crazy. So, as a fast workaround, I had to write a script for exporting the hair as a lower degree (because I already knew how to write an exporter, but for importing I still need to learn a bit more). I also changed the makehuman .obj curve exporter to save it as quadratic curve so that contributors can still work in Blender while we find a real fix for this (I need to contact the developers of Blender's .obj exporter/importer).

The other news is ... there is a new tutorial on how hairs are grouped to have a decent render of hairs in makehuman. By the way, I want to extend my thanks to workinprogress for contributing the hair in my tutorial (I also commited it in the svn). Since a lot of people are asking me how the hair rendering and hair interpolating works, I wrote a short explanation of it in the tutorial as well. The tutorial is available here.

PS: we use Blender 2.49b to import. As far as I know Blender's 2.5x has no importer for Wavefront .obj files yet... even if they did I would guess that importing .obj curves is not yet implemented.

PPS: If I want to briefly summarize: At the moment for things to work.. in Blender we export .obj curves using our own script and import using Blender's importer.