Help to Improve the documentation

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Help to Improve the documentation

Postby jpujolar » Fri Sep 11, 2020 4:01 pm

Hello,

I am reading with detail the documentation provided for the use of Makeclothes2 in the following address:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... :ClothesV2

I have found the following issues from the perspective of a non-expert user somewhat familiar with Blender:

1. Where it says: "Blend-files which are placed in the "humans" sub-directory of the makeclothes plugin can be used directly."
The intended meaning of this sentence is obscure to me. I do not know where the subdirectories of the "plugin" are. There is no "humans" subdirectory in the set of directories that appear in /makehuman/v1py3... etc... There are obviously no subdirectories attached to the downloaded zip files of the plugins either. For what I gather reading on, it seems that this refers to a future functionality. If so, it is confusing andit should not be explained in this way. No reader will understand it that is not already very familiar with the details of the project (and hence does not need to read the documentation).

2. Overall, in the "load predefined human" subsection, the connection between text and images is unclear. Is the long image on the right connected to the text? How? In my own plug in I do not see what the small image on the left displays. It is not clear which "moments" of the action the pictures depict.

3. The "Load the human via MPFB" subsection is also quite confusing on various counts.
a) Is the long picture on the right connected to the text? If so, how?
b) The sentence "Do not use proxies" is obscure. If proxies are above defined as all the elements other than the body, and base mesh is by definition a human body, why should anybody consider using a proxy as body if both concepts are mutually exclusive?
c) "If you need the helpers..." The subsection is presented as having to do with loading the base mesh, no the clothes/proxies/helpers. To an unpracticed reader, this is again confusing, and the multiple possible meanings of a word like "helper" makes it worse. It seems to me that "loading the human/base mesh" is one step. The next step is to create the clothing, which can be done over parts of the "base mesh" redefined as "clothing/proxies/etc." or by importing a helper mesh. Here there is a need to branch the explanation.
d) The picture is not a picture of the Makeclothes2 plugin interface in blender, is it? It is the MakeHuman pluguin. Readers need to be made aware.
e) The sentence: Instead of "don't modify" you can also use "Mask". Yes, you can; but if you do, no helpers get imported. So why say this exactly?

4. Problems in the "Load normal base.obj file" subsection.
a) The sentence "MakeClothes reads the wavefront file." No idea what it means and why I need to know.
b) I begin to understand in the paragraph below. As I check the export features of MH, I see the "Wavefront obj" is an export format. This section should have started by explaining this.
c) Later I find two sentences that seem to contradict each other according to what has been explained to me
- no proxy, do not use smoothing and delete the extra eyes
- It is possible to export it including the helpers
If "proxies" were everything except the body itself, then how can I export helpers, which I thought were the same as proxies?

5. "Load an mhx2 file": does it refer to importing the file through the regular blender menu or through the plugin menus?

6. I do not understand the comments on the deletion of helpers, except the part that there is a vertex group called "body".

7. "Test the clothes" section. The really excellent funcionality that selects the problematic vertices in edit mode should be explained better.
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Re: Help to Improve the documentation

Postby punkduck » Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:56 am

jpujolar wrote:Hello,

I am reading with detail the documentation provided for the use of Makeclothes2 in the following address:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... :ClothesV2

I have found the following issues from the perspective of a non-expert user somewhat familiar with Blender:


This documentation is new and still "under construction" (see the first line ;) ) ... so this is not ready and also might be reorganized in a way. Atm I used it to answer some questions here and there so it started to grow.
It was used not again and again write an answer for the same questions.

I started with that, when the tool was under construction (and it still is). We had an old makeclothes of the same name and so we had big confusion. I moved old documentation to a "history folder" and started with the new one.

In the end it should NOT be a pure beginners documentation because beginners are not able to work with blender. In a way creating clothes is advanced. It is not a one-click tool and at least some knowledge is needed, because of the limits makehuman (and also makeclothes) has. My idea is to put some sub-chapters into extra pages to explain certain topics. This not already done, because then these pages will only have one line of text ... but for questions we then have the possibility to link to these pages directly. I will give quick answers to what you have written ...


jpujolar wrote:1. Where it says: "Blend-files which are placed in the "humans" sub-directory of the makeclothes plugin can be used directly."
The intended meaning of this sentence is obscure to me. I do not know where the subdirectories of the "plugin" are. There is no "humans" subdirectory in the set of directories that appear in /makehuman/v1py3... etc... There are obviously no subdirectories attached to the downloaded zip files of the plugins either. For what I gather reading on, it seems that this refers to a future functionality. If so, it is confusing andit should not be explained in this way. No reader will understand it that is not already very familiar with the details of the project (and hence does not need to read the documentation).


as I wrote in the yellow text (it was a help for those who are familiar and wanted to do it without MPFB). When you create the directory humans (in blender scripts/addons/makeclothes/humans) and put the files in that directory then it works with predefined meshes. After fixing some errors in extract-helpers I just asked Joel to merge this code. Then it is official ...

jpujolar wrote:2. Overall, in the "load predefined human" subsection, the connection between text and images is unclear. Is the long image on the right connected to the text? How? In my own plug in I do not see what the small image on the left displays. It is not clear which "moments" of the action the pictures depict.

You will see that, when you create the directory and put the blend files in. Blender is context sensitive and it is written to only show these buttons when the files are there. Of course this problem also disappears when the code is merged.

jpujolar wrote:3. The "Load the human via MPFB" subsection is also quite confusing on various counts.
a) Is the long picture on the right connected to the text? If so, how?

no, the way with MPFB is not yet documented properly. When it was written, I was not aware of the load settings feature. This I can change now. This is normal when we develop and write documentation the same time :mrgreen:
jpujolar wrote: b) The sentence "Do not use proxies" is obscure. If proxies are above defined as all the elements other than the body, and base mesh is by definition a human body, why should anybody consider using a proxy as body if both concepts are mutually exclusive?

because people already did. When you want to have a male body and select a different topology in MakeHuman then export and import it or use MPFB ... then this won't work. The different vertex order will make problems. The topologies and the clothes are both called proxies. Yes I have to rethink the naming maybe
jpujolar wrote: c) "If you need the helpers..." The subsection is presented as having to do with loading the base mesh, no the clothes/proxies/helpers. To an unpracticed reader, this is again confusing, and the multiple possible meanings of a word like "helper" makes it worse. It seems to me that "loading the human/base mesh" is one step. The next step is to create the clothing, which can be done over parts of the "base mesh" redefined as "clothing/proxies/etc." or by importing a helper mesh. Here there is a need to branch the explanation.

this is one of the problems. The helper is part of the basemesh. Extracting parts of the helper and modifying them is of course one way to create clothes. But that is not what the helper was build for. The helper is influenced by targets (as the body itself). When clothes are ready you have to decide if they should follow the helper or the body. Especially for a skirt it should follow the helper. For swimware you should use the body.
jpujolar wrote: d) The picture is not a picture of the Makeclothes2 plugin interface in blender, is it? It is the MakeHuman pluguin. Readers need to be made aware.

which one? the MPFB picture? No it is simply out of date and I left out some points. It will be changed also.
jpujolar wrote: e) The sentence: Instead of "don't modify" you can also use "Mask". Yes, you can; but if you do, no helpers get imported. So why say this exactly?

nope ... they are there. But you was not able to extract them properly. This was a bug until yesterday. Well normally people model on the body and switch on the helper to mark the vertex groups. The other possibility: to load a mesh without helpers, model the clothes and then load the mesh with helper and do the vertex-assignments.
jpujolar wrote:4. Problems in the "Load normal base.obj file" subsection.
a) The sentence "MakeClothes reads the wavefront file." No idea what it means and why I need to know.

when you save your clothes, when MakeHuman loads its basemesh ... these are wavefront files. They end with .obj. Yes other people use these, I don't do it.
jpujolar wrote: b) I begin to understand in the paragraph below. As I check the export features of MH, I see the "Wavefront obj" is an export format. This section should have started by explaining this.
c) Later I find two sentences that seem to contradict each other according to what has been explained to me
- no proxy, do not use smoothing and delete the extra eyes
- It is possible to export it including the helpers
If "proxies" were everything except the body itself, then how can I export helpers, which I thought were the same as proxies?

same as above: helpers are part of the basemesh. These are normally not visible in MakeHuman. Proxies are different topologies of the body. Like the male mesh or one with a reduced number of vertices. And also, just for confusion ;) , the clothes you will create. Meanwhile I have the idea to write an extra page which describes the basemesh (body + helpers). This will be linked then. I know that the order of the document is not that easy. Unfortunately I have to write the base knowledge somewhere and best not all in one page.

jpujolar wrote:5. "Load an mhx2 file": does it refer to importing the file through the regular blender menu or through the plugin menus?

when you write blender plugins you decide if this plugin will be in an extra box or will appear in the menus. So this is also a plugin ... but yes it is in the regular import blender menu.

jpujolar wrote:6. I do not understand the comments on the deletion of helpers, except the part that there is a vertex group called "body".


When you use one of the other techniques instead of MPFB the body will be always loaded with all the helpers. So there is a possibility to delete these helper and work only with the body. The predefined files but afaik some of the other imported files have a vertex-group body.

jpujolar wrote:7. "Test the clothes" section. The really excellent funcionality that selects the problematic vertices in edit mode should be explained better.


what is missing there?

Well tbh. there are 4 ways to load a human. In the end everyone will use one of his/her favorite method. The easiest one, when you work with "standard meshes" (male, female average) will be the predefined ones. I build them in t-pose and standard-pose. When somebody wants to create the clothes on a non-average character MPFB is a good way and mhx2 is a possibility and .obj also. This sentence I will prepend when the code is merged.
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Re: Help to Improve the documentation

Postby jpujolar » Sat Sep 12, 2020 2:55 pm

Hello,

Maybe I can propose another text, and you use it if you like it enough, and you don't if you don't. I think that it can be a little longer; but not much.

Here it is. It is just the first paragraphs.

About this bits in red I am not 100% sure.

I hope it works for you. If not, just drop it.

Joan
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Re: Help to Improve the documentation

Postby punkduck » Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:01 pm

jpujolar wrote:Hello,

Maybe I can propose another text, and you use it if you like it enough, and you don't if you don't. I think that it can be a little longer; but not much.

Here it is. It is just the first paragraphs.

About this bits in red I am not 100% sure.

I hope it works for you. If not, just drop it.

Joan


Nothing will be dropped :) We need the input. Problem is still, that I have a lot of different tasks here and all programmer tend to neglect documentation. I have to rethink this layout a bit, because the document is more like "how to get a human" than "how to build the clothes". So it will be restructured. But I can use your ideas for the details.

As you can see I wrote a lot to answer and normally all comments are used to improve the documentation. As you might have noticed I also changed :

"Vertex group as clothes:" + Button "Extract clothes" to "Optional base for clothes:" + "Extract from Helper" in makeclothes.

So this part of Documentation can be written now in a better way. Usually people will extract either tight or skirt but especially that would be part of what I will write. Tbh: I never used this function.

Just as an example, I had questions why a skirt is distorted when a character walks and why legs appear outside of this skirt. So I created this text, which is also part of the documentation. Main issue is to link the texts, so that words like proxy or helper maybe explained in detail somewhere else. Nevertheless, we need the input of the users because we are a small community.

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/Documentation:MakeClothes_Delete-Groups
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Re: Help to Improve the documentation

Postby jpujolar » Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:09 pm

All those moving targets,,, :)
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Re: Help to Improve the documentation

Postby punkduck » Sun Sep 13, 2020 4:14 pm

I did some work on it, I did not yet separate load and the rest but:
  • I now use the official term topology (we use that in MH) for a different "skin-mesh" instead of proxy.
  • I added an extra page about what the base mesh (including helpers) is, it is placed in the developers section and linked. Even that I call it developers-section, the top parts should be easy to understand. The section about the bones I added, because people already asks how it works ... or they build their own targets and moved the tiny cubes to some weird places which will result to a funny skeleton then :mrgreen:
  • I explained "extract from helpers" and exchanged the illustrations
  • I tried a better version with MPFB, I am not the professional here, because I normally use the predefined meshes, but since my first documentation was outdated it should be okay now. I also explained what masking means in this case and how to use this (as a feature) when you model the clothes. In the old version there was no easy way to model on the body and use the helper as a comparison. As I wrote before, I had to model on the body first, then throw this away, and then to load a body with helpers to assign clothes to the helper instead of the body.

I am just waiting for the rest to include the predefined meshes --- but there are people who use their weekends for other purposes than MH, I guess ... :shock:
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