Announcement: MakeHuman nightly build for OS X will be suspended

Since I need to use my private mac mini for job reason I have to suspend the Nightly Build for a not foreseeable time up from now.

In addition I announce my retirement from working for the Team in the near future. The reason for this is simply the lack of time. I cannot support the MH Team for the OS X maintenance as the Project deserves. I say this with a heavy heart.

So probably we'll find anybody else is able to take over these parts?

Is there any Mac User who is willing to take over this job?

- Peter -

Rough Makehuman Posing coming in Alpha 6

Heres a preview from the latest nightly build:



More to come soon (we are trying to implement skinning).

Joint-bending reloaded

Update 2011.04.24:
Joint-bending has now been disabled. In view of the previous update, it does not serve any purpose anymore, and it causes some problems. The option is still available in the mhx importer, but it does not do anything for newly exported mhx files.

Update 2011.03.19:
In case anybody has worried about the joint-bending, you can now forget about it. I fixed the problem by moving the knee joint instead.

Let me explain the problem and the solution. For most targets, the knee joint is located in front of the line between the hip and the ankle. When we turn on IK and move the foot up, the leg bends forward as is should.


However, the leg in the MakeHuman mesh is quite straight, i.e. the knee diamond is located very close to the hip-ankle line. If the knee diamond happens to be at the other side of the line, the leg will bend in the wrong direction. Note that this problem only occurs with IK; the FK leg still bends correctly.


Even if I have not encountered any character which behaves as badly as in the figure above, the diamond is translated in the X direction for some targets, which makes the knee bend inwards or outwards, like the child below. Joint-bending addressed this problem, but I think that the new solution is both simpler and better. Now the knee joint is not placed exactly in the diamond, but rather 1 cm in front of the hip-ankle line. The difference is neglible in the cases I have checked, but the IK legs now always bend in the right way.



Original post:
Some time ago I wrote about changing the rest pose for better IK. In Blender, it is best if the character is modelled with knees and elbows slightly bent, to tell the IK solver about the preferred bending axes. However, the improvement is minor for the default adult character that I'm doing most of my testing with. The bending option has therefore remained unused for quite a while, while the code deteriorated.

Recently scottfredeman pointed out a problem with toe twisting, which appears for short characters. When examining the child (default settings except for the age slider), I realized that his knees were bending around the wrong axis. Here we see the same pose (Root bone moved down) for the child, imported without and with the Bend joints option checked, respectively. Even if the pose to the right is not perfect, it is a considerable improvement compared to the left one.

To use Bend Joints, the mhx importer must be updated, due to an API change. The updated importer is in MH svn and tomorrow's nightly build. It is also in Blender svn, and will hence appear automatically in future Blender builds.


In some comments to the above-mentioned post, which I missed at the time, Illin points out that bending joints is not necessary in Maya, because the preferred bending axis can be specified anyway. That's great for the Maya folks, but I am not aware of anything similar for Blender. If there is, I would like to know.

Testing MakeHuman + Sculptris + Aqsis

This will be the default rendering level of MH beta1.

Displacement maps will be realized  using Sculptris, and rendered with Aqsis.
XNormal will be used to generate displacement maps.

Fig.1 - A screenshot from Sculptris, with details on MH old head model.

Fig. 2 - A quick rendering test

Mocap tool for custom armatures

For some time the mocap tool has worked with the game rig and Rorkimaru's proxy, and not just with the native MHX rig. The natural next step is to create a tool which works with general, user-defined rigs.



In this example, I was using Sintel Lite. The mocap tool is the file space_view3d_mhx_mocap.py, which comes with the MakeHuman nightly builds, and can also downloaded from svn. Load the file into a text window and run it. Two new panels appear in the User Interface window (N-key): the mocap tool itself (labelled Bvh to Mhx), and the Custom Armature panel. In the latter, press the single button labelled Initialize character.



A list of bone associations appear in the panel. The figure below shows how I filled it in for Sintel Lite. Since the legs are controlled by IK by default, and the mocap tool does not yet work with IK for this rig (not quite sure why), the legs must be switched to FK. The switch controls are bone properties of foot_ik.L and foot_ik.R. Once this is done, we load an animation as usual by pressing the Load, retarget, simplify button and navigating to the relevant bvh file.



And after a while the animation is loaded. This example shows the cartwheel animation which is the first in the scene in the movie.



Update 2011.03.06. Mocap now works with IK. The problem was that the IK bone in the Sintel rig did not use local locations. There are now also slots for the elbow and knee pole targets, which need be filled in if applicable.