MakeHuman features (where are they)

[NewArt2000]

First of all I,m not in the habit of bashing. I have played around with makehuman a little starting with alpha 6, alpha 7 wasn't to bad nor alpha 8 , which I can't find anymore. All the versions after that generate a character as advertised. Make walk is great tool, I even figured out makeclothes. But as a novice in 3d and animation one would like things to be simple. in alpha six with the faceshapes and visemes one could pull off some good lipsync and facial animations. Even if you are doing a still your characters expression tells the story. Now I am aware that Makehuman is free and the developers aren't making a fortune. Please be timely !!! Keep things under your hat that are a long way off instead of having users wait for something thats not in the works anytime soon. For me I saw the thing about the new face shapes and all. Even in a experimental version a release would prove you are trying to deliver. The mhx2 thing, Somethings should have been left out as they are in no way usable. I know it takes time to create a quality shape key but to put out something that destroys the mesh and doesn't even come close to whatever it was to be is well shameful. I mean I tried the mhx2 lipsync and my characters face disappeared. I am not trying to insult anyone I'm just being honest about the software which has great potential which is going away like many of it's features. Please don't take this as bashing!!!

[ThomasL]

Let me first say that I understand your frustration. A major reason why mhx2 had to be an independent third-party plug-in is that I wanted to bring back lipsync as it was in alpha 6, and that was not possible to do within MH.

I am not sure why your character's face disappears when you try lipsync with mhx2, because it works for me now. However, keep in mind that the mhx2 download is not yet a release, but a snapshot into the development code, and there may have been some bug in the version you downloaded. Whatever it was, it should be fixed by now. The quality of the facial shapekeys could be better though. To use lipsync, you need to enable Face Shapes and either Face Drivers or Face Panel on import, and you need to add a rig different from the default Exported.

Eventually there will be a stable version of mhx2, of course. In fact, that should happen quite soon, because I am not really aware of any major bugs or omissions anymore.

There is also some documentation:http://thomasmakehuman.wordpress.com/mhx2-documentation/ .

[NewArt2000]

Let me first say that I understand your frustration. A major reason why mhx2 had to be an independent third-party plug-in is that I wanted to bring back lipsync as it was in alpha 6, and that was not possible to do within MH.

I am not sure why your character's face disappears when you try lipsync with mhx2, because it works for me now. However, keep in mind that the mhx2 download is not yet a release, but a snapshot into the development code, and there may have been some bug in the version you downloaded. Whatever it was, it should be fixed by now. The quality of the facial shapekeys could be better though. To use lipsync, you need to enable Face Shapes and either Face Drivers or Face Panel on import, and you need to add a rig different from the default Exported.

Eventually there will be a stable version of mhx2, of course. In fact, that should happen quite soon, because I am not really aware of any major bugs or omissions anymore.

There is also some documentation:http://thomasmakehuman.wordpress.com/mhx2-documentation/ .

Thanks for responding and understanding. I Imagine that the coding and setting things up is a very time consuming task. This is what i'm referring to. It seems the vertices in each shape key are not connected thus leading to distortion when used. I read the documentation before I installed it. I used the mhx rig . The driver panel is different from the one in your document. Maybe I did get a buggy download but these are the results I get from the viseme panel.

[ThomasL]

It is difficult to tell what has gone wrong, since MHX2 has been heavily developed recently. Remember that the project started less than two months ago, and even if some older code has been reused, things have been very much in a state of flux. This is changing now. A I just wrote, http://www.makehuman.org/blog/mhx2_stable_version_023.html, there is now a version of MHX2 which I consider to be feature complete and quite stable. It can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/04na6ls7ue4ogtn/mhx2_stable_023.zip?dl=0.

Btw, from your pictures it looks like a scale issue. If you exported from MH using meters, and your version of the MHX2 importer did not rescale the shapekeys from the default decimeter units, things could look like that. Anyway, the stable version handles unit conversion of shapekeys correctly.

[NewArt2000]

It is difficult to tell what has gone wrong, since MHX2 has been heavily developed recently. Remember that the project started less than two months ago, and even if some older code has been reused, things have been very much in a state of flux. This is changing now. A I just wrote, http://www.makehuman.org/blog/mhx2_stable_version_023.html, there is now a version of MHX2 which I consider to be feature complete and quite stable. It can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/s/04na6ls7ue4ogtn/mhx2_stable_023.zip?dl=0.

Btw, from your pictures it looks like a scale issue. If you exported from MH using meters, and your version of the MHX2 importer did not rescale the shapekeys from the default decimeter units, things could look like that. Anyway, the stable version handles unit conversion of shapekeys correctly.

Thank you very much! I downloaded mhx2 6afc2983d26 and it worked spot on. I will download the latest version. Thanks for the link. Nice work I do like the features and I have been exploring all the things that the addon does. Great Job ! My interest in makehuman has once again peaked. Thanks again.

[Shaba1]

Thanks for all the hard work Thomas. I have 4 question about mhx2

#1 will it work with the low poly proxy meshes

#2 will it work with the game,simple and second life rigs

#3 if it does work with other things then the mhx rig can you get the facial animation bones with those rigs also?

#4 Will it work with your MakeWalk plug in with the game,simple and second life rigs.

[ThomasL]

Thanks for all the hard work Thomas. I have 4 question about mhx2

#1 will it work with the low poly proxy meshes

#2 will it work with the game,simple and second life rigs

#3 if it does work with other things then the mhx rig can you get the facial animation bones with those rigs also?

#4 Will it work with your MakeWalk plug in with the game,simple and second life rigs.

#1. Yes. You can choose between importing the base mesh, the proxy mesh, or both.

#2. This can be handled in two ways. By default, the importer uses the rig exported from MH, so export with that. Alternatively, the importer can do the rigging, and all the old rigs are there. This may seem like overkill, but it didn't require any extra code. The MHX and Rigify rigs must be added by the importer, since they are completely Blender specific.

#3. Yes, for all rigs that are defined by the importer. There is a checkbox for that. Currently it does not work with the Exported rig, though.

#4. Just checked with the mhx and game rigs. MakeWalk seems to work just fine. Found a bug with mhx vertex group naming, though.

[Manuel]

Even in a experimental version a release would prove you are trying to deliver.

Shapekeys were removed from old versions due a good reason: they didn't work with enough quality for all characters.
They will be replaced very soon with the new technology of face rigging.

In the official MakeHuman we will include only features that really work and are stable for professional pipelines.
They require time to be developed and modeled. You are asking for quick and dirty hacked solutions, just to show that we are "trying to deliver".
This will no longer happen.

If you want to see how hard we are working you can just subscribe to this news feed:
https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman/rss

[duststorm]

You can download the nightly builds to get an early preview of what is coming.