MHX-2 exporter fails to load in MH r1469

[Aranuvir]

Hi Thomas, I very appreciate your Work on MHX-2 . Unfortunately the exporter is not running with the latest MakeHuman version from Bitbucket due to this error:

Could not load 9_export_mhx2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./core/mhmain.py", line 476, in loadPlugin
module = imp.load_module(name, fp, pathname, description)
File "plugins/9_export_mhx2/__init__.py", line 21, in <module>
from exportutils.config import Config
ImportError: No module named exportutils.config

I'm using MakeHuman r1469 and the latest version of MHX-2 (cf97da9). Is there any chance to get this bug fixed soon?

[duststorm]

exportutils has been purged from the sourcetree as there are no more exporters dependent on it.
The same goes for the armature package.

If these are still required by the mhx exporter, and there is no alternative for them in the new mh source, then they will have to be added to the plugin package separately.
However these modules were removed because they were largely unstructured and had very few documentation (making it hard to make new programmers acqainted with them). There was also the problem that they were very coupled: they had many dependencies spanning the entire source folder, so importing them caused a whole chain of dependencies to be imported as well.

[Aranuvir]

Hello Duststorm,
I know that the MHX-Exporter will no longer be developed in the MH-Project. And reading your explanation I can understand your reasons. However I think it's a pity. MH has its roots in Blender and having a native importer to Blender would be valuable. Trying out COLLADA didn't work well for me (at least at the moment) and I disapprove the proprietary FBX-Format, though it is widely-used.

[Manuel]

Hello Duststorm,
I know that the MHX-Exporter will no longer be developed in the MH-Project. And reading your explanation I can understand your reasons. However I think it's a pity. MH has its roots in Blender and having a native importer to Blender would be valuable. Trying out COLLADA didn't work well for me (at least at the moment) and I disapprove the proprietary FBX-Format, though it is widely-used.

Hi Aranuvir.
Don't worry, for two reasons.

1) As Thomas Larsson explains here, mhx2 is an mhx evolution: http://www.makehuman.org/blog/mhx2_make ... mat_2.html
We don't officially support it because it includes some old or experimental features that are not compatible with MH design, but Thomas (that is the creator of mhx) is very motivated to work on it.

2) In 2015 we will release a new Blender tool, according the MH design. The user will import his MH file in Blender, via collada of fbx (this means that we will be more focused to improve these standard formats and people will be motivate to give us valuable feedback about them) and then, using the new, small utility, it will be possible to add the helpers for animation, materials etc. This approach is better of the old mhx, because, for example, it will not longer suffer of version problems, it's more easy to maintain, it's not hardcoded, etc..

So as you see, we are going to improve the support for Blender and in meantime we want to improve the portability of MH characters to other software, via standard format.

[Shaba1]

Ok this is all well and good but what is the solution. I am using Makehuman r1241 (47eda58327eee) and I cannot get and mhx2 export. I do not even get anything in the command line box that opens with Makehuman. I will try to find the link to posting error reports again so I know which files to copy and paste but after looking so forward to MHX2 I am sad it did not work.

[ThomasL]

This bug was due to a change in the MH api. It should be fixed in the development version.

If you want a stable version, use MHX2 stable version 0.24, MH 1.0.2, and Blender 2.71. Everything works with that combination, I think.

There are no guarantees with other combinations, since both Blender and MH api may change, and I may introduce new bugs. But I think that the MHX2 unstable works with most combination after recent bugfixes. For how long is impossible to say.

[Aranuvir]

1) Hi Manuel, thanks for the interesting informations about your plans for the development. I wasn't really worried about the future of the MHX-exporter and of course i have read Thomas Blog. I just wanted to express my point of view about the integration of MHX in MakeHuman for the moment. Seeing your Plans for the future my opinion si now superfluous.
At this point I would like to thank the MH-Team for the great work they are doing.

2) Hi Thomas, thanks for your quick solution of the problem I reported. I pulled the latest MHX-2 version from your repository and tried it out with MH r1494 from trunk. So far it works. But the exporter produces an error when trying to export the mesh with the new rig. I think this feature still needs to be implemented and don't consider it a bug. If it helps I can provide error-log. This brings up two further questions:
- is there a separate bugtracker for MHX-2 or where should be reported a bug best?
- what are the differences between the "new rigs" from thomas' newrig repo, from the MakeHuman-newrig-staging repo and the MakeHuman (trunk) repo?

Best, Aranuvir

[duststorm]

what are the differences between the "new rigs" from thomas' newrig repo, from the MakeHuman-newrig-staging repo and the MakeHuman (trunk) repo?

Newrig-staging is merged in the official repo now, so they are the same. Development continues in the official repo and the other repositories will be abandoned.

The 'newrig' referred mainly to the new master rig that will be used, which is called "default" and is currently the only rig available in the official unstable. We are working on adding new ones, but the old rigs will be abandoned and replaced.
Along with changing the rigs, we have also changed the data format in which we store rigs, which is purely data-based, whereas the old rigs were defined in code. This hardcoding of rigs lead to very large portions of code that were difficult to understand and maintain, let alone be used by external plugins.

[Shaba1]

This bug was due to a change in the MH api. It should be fixed in the development version.

If you want a stable version, use MHX2 stable version 0.24, MH 1.0.2, and Blender 2.71. Everything works with that combination, I think.

There are no guarantees with other combinations, since both Blender and MH api may change, and I may introduce new bugs. But I think that the MHX2 unstable works with most combination after recent bugfixes. For how long is impossible to say.

Well I downloaded the win32 stalble and nightly of MH1.0.2 thinking that as Thomas said that may be my problem was that I was using 1.1.0 dev version. Well the problem is that after I unzipped the win32 build of MH1.0.2 to a folder then clicked on the makehuman icon I got the standard win 7 dialog that said would you like to exectute this program. I clicked run and nothing happened other then a rotating blue circle for about 30 seconds. I even ran task manager to see if anything were running. Nothing related to makehuman in taskman. I wrote about this in the bug reports area of this forum. can someone help I really would like to try out mhx2

[ThomasL]

Aranuvir: You can export the official rig from the newrig repo; it is the only rig without an icon in the Pose/Skeleton tab. It does not work with MH unstable though, due to very recent api changes which are not very easy to understand. MHX2 should eventually adapt to changes in the MH api, but it seems premature to attempt this until thing are stable again.

Shaba1: Sorry to hear about your problems with MH 1.0.2. However, this problem is not related to MHX2, since any problem in there would only lead to that this package is not loaded.