blindsaypatten wrote:I'm afraid that I don't understand the thinking about MHX2. If you told me that three or four months from now MHX2 will stop working and I'll be limited to creating static characters in the default pose and rendered with the internal MH renderer from then on, I would walk away without looking back. Lucky for me, I know that at very least the option is there to just not upgrade Blender. I haven't tried the Blender alternatives so I don't know whether, if a virus/worm destroyed every trace of Blender out of existence, whether I could just start using something else. I'm only guessing that if there was something equivalent that I would read more about it here
You can still pose your characters with the other file formats (I usually use .dae), you just have to assign the materials every time. It's inconvenient but still usable.
Personally I'm interested in stuff that lets advanced users who know what they want to be able to work things out to minimize the number of clicks. So I wouldn't mind having more MHX2 material export options.
But hearing this does make me glad that the principled shader is being added to blender before 2.8...
(And now that I think about it, the "why doesn't it work like you expect it to by default" is a problem with blender in general, really. Or with being new to 3d in general, not sure. But you have to look around a while to figure out stuff you expected would be simple like "how to make a falling object stop passing through the floor". )
And ManeulLab seems to be designed more along the lines of what you said, with multi layered skin texture and optional studio lighting on startup. You just don't have as much creative freedom, like making mixed race or androgynous characters, because what kind of crazy person would want that??? ....Thats, uh, of course not a jab at you if you turn out to prefer ManeulLab. Just me being mad at an (otherwise promising) app for removing a feature I liked that its predecessor had.
PS. Maybe you're also used to using mxh2 for the exchange from blender to makehuman, which in that case, I know nothing about, since I never found out where that feature is or how to use it. I just heard it exists I think?
......OH. It's because you can only use inverse kinematics with MHX2, isn't it? Unless there's a way to use it with the other file formats that I don't know about, of course.