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masculinize body

PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:15 pm
by blindsaypatten
Jujube,

Right now the male_body_only8 target doesn't include the neck in the masculinization, I think it probably should. If I try to thicken it back up using the Neck sliders under the Face tab I get undesirable artifacts in the back of the neck where it meets the back. Would it be easy to make a version that includes the neck in "the body" ? I think that it might be easier to merge the neck under the chin than at the base of the neck.

Upon closer examination, the scale depth of neck target produces a ridge between the neck and back when pushed to the upper end for any configuration of base, male, or female. It is like sometime after the neck target was made someone put a deep wide valley down the back of the model, which I really don't think should be there, but I will have to research a bit to make sure. It looks like it would if the modeler confused the protrusion of the shoulder blades for a central concavity. Actually, now that I look, the upper back on the base mesh is a bumpy mess.

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 10:20 pm
by jujube
I made that target before I found the male/female universal targets in the github source code (data/targets/macrodetails). They don't change the height or the head, so if they don't affect the neck already, it should be easy to add it.

I did also notice that the shape of the clavicle/shoulder area is way different in base.obj vs in the base toon.

Another important thing to note is that according to the wiki, the current mesh was designed by Manuel to minimize the number of poles, under the assumption that poles are bad for some reason? They have a visualization of old versions of the MH topology, and some of them seem to have the usual kind of nostril wing topology you see on Google images. When I have the time I'll try and dig up those old models.
(The archived blender forum toontje topology PDF has an example of an all quad no poles head... the results are not pretty)

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 1:35 am
by blindsaypatten
Where in the docs does it talk about the old mesh? I have some memory of seeing that but now I can't find it.

It's a good question why the base mesh looks so different from the blended default...

Just for giggles I made an attempt at reworking the nose and cheeks in the base mesh. It won't be usable but I did learn a bit.

Remesh1.png
Changes to the nose and cheeks on the right side of the image, default on the left.


For the curious, here is the loop structure for the current mesh:
MeshLoopsFront.png

MeshLoopsSide.png

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 4:14 am
by jujube
It's in here: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... h_topology

I've done SO MUCH staring at those loops. Here's one I did a while ago: This is what happens when you flatten the mouth/nose area and turn it all into circles. 3poles in red, 5poles in blue. It seems the whole nose region was origially extruded out of a single face.
nose mouth area loops.png


I didn't already have a screenshot of this one for some reason. Here I selected all the poles and then colored the toplology. (edges of the) 5poles in pink, dull light blue for simple* planar regions, darker/brighter blue for extruded areas (with deep blue dots for 2nd extrudes within the extruded areas, seen on the nails, nipples, nostrils, and ears. )
poles.PNG

*or not always simple in the case of the face and torso i guess, it's interrupted by extrusions. I was just trying to delineate different areas of the mesh.


Also, today I played around some more with fitting the male model to the bodyparts3d 3.0 skin organ. While tinkering I found that:
1)The (upper) lip scale targets also change the nose for some reason
2)The makehuman lips dont have dimples in the corner, the lips are too flat. (the existing mouth dimple target sucks)

Getting even more off topic, a couple weeks ago I also made a topology with deeper realistic nostrils. I tried to make an ear canal too but it wasn't turning out right, same old issues with base.obj. After I finish this all-nighter(!!) I can FINALLY go back to working on MH again.

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 7:01 pm
by blindsaypatten
I moved the mesh vertices around to align the mesh with the jawline:
JawLineNew.png

This makes it relatively easy to produce any jawline you like, rather than torturing you if you want a jawline other than the one that is restricted to a subset of Caucasian males.
JawLineOld.png

The core of the problem is it's damn hard to manually make a relatively sharp jawline running from below the ear to the chin when the edges in the mesh cross over the jawline at oblique angles:
JawLineCrossing.png


I'm no expert on mesh topology, I mostly rely on my experience with trying to attain the shape I want, but after a little reading it seems to me that the main idea with quadrangles and poles is to produce a mesh that is easy for the designer to work with, and avoid meshes that produce unwanted anomolies when they are translated into the all-triangle mesh that all the machine work is done with. Done well, loops and so forth make it easier to produce more organic looking meshes. But trying to attain purity at the expense of ease of use by the designer is self-defeating. There's nothing wrong with a pole or even a triangle if they are well behaved.

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 8:07 pm
by jujube
Things I want from the MH blender tools:
1) makeclothes to allow a stray triangle or two
2) an option to have the startup mesh in makeclothes (or better yet, make your own)

(I want to make an ear canal but this second issue makes it hard. I haven't tried making separate Caucasian Male and Caucasian Female ear canals but I shouldn't have to do that)

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 2:05 am
by blindsaypatten
jujube wrote:Things I want from the MH blender tools:
1) makeclothes to allow a stray triangle or two
2) an option to have the startup mesh in makeclothes (or better yet, make your own)

(I want to make an ear canal but this second issue makes it hard. I haven't tried making separate Caucasian Male and Caucasian Female ear canals but I shouldn't have to do that)


Do you know what the basis of the quad-only restriction is?

Could you load and apply a target using MakeTarget to get the default mesh?

Do you mean you are making an ear canal as a separate object like the male bits? Given that there are already multiple mesh topologies available, it would be nice to understand the mechanism that allows for that. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to accomplish my goals with the existing meshes, I'm wondering if there is a route to creating my own and if so what restrictions would apply.

I also don't know how to approach building a better armature that doesn't create deformations at joints. I know how to build one in Blender but not whether there is a route to incorporate it back into MakeHuman, or if it would just stay in Blender. I don't know if MakeHuman supports the drivers and armature constraints available in blender, it clearly supports shape keys, although whether they can be tied to the armature pose I don't know.

So many questions, my ignorance is boundless!

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 3:34 am
by jujube
If your mesh has triangles in it, makeclothes complains that you can't combine tris and quads, and doesn't compile it. (This implies that you could make a mesh with tris if it was all tris. I tried this once and it complained about poles instead. )

My approach was to create a proxy with the new ear topology, and makeclothes doesn't have a startup mesh in the dropdown list. (I assumed you couldn't fit clothes to things that aren't on the list, but come to think of it, maybe I'll try doing that. Create mesh via maketarget, then set as human in makeclothes.)
But I did also think of creating a separate ear model and using it as clothes. I want to make a topology with no ear, just a hole or flat surface where the ear loops would be. It would then be easy to exchange it with all kinds of ear clothing items with different topologies (animal ears, pierced ears, etc)
The problem is that I would inset a hole, change it to circle shape on base.obj, but then in makehuman it would be elongated and blocky. I could create an ear clothing and link it to an ear vertex group on the human, but if I did that, it might still have the same problem. Hmm.
If an ear clothing item can be morphed with all the usual targets, then that would be pretty much the ideal scenario.

I finally have the free time to make some targets again. Just now I created a proof of concept ear, which deforms with the ear and also uses the ears as a delete group. So forget the stuff I just said about making a "no ear" topology.

There was a forum user who asked about creating inner ear structures; I keep daydreaming about that kind of anatomical visualization.

Did you get your exporting rigs/weights to load properly in makehuman? Your knee weighting looked great from what I can tell and I'd happily use it. There were problems with the bone rotation planes, where you have to copy it from the default skeleton, but I don't remember if the weights displayed properly. (I think you said the clothing didn't deform but that could have been an issue with just your jammers.) There are a few user contributed rigs available, and if any of them were custom created by users, then they must have found some way to get around the bone rotation issue. Since I currently have no idea how those bone rotation planes would be determined by hand.

I also need to ask CallHarvey3d how he created his lotus pose knee corrective target. Since I don't think you could use a posed human as a referene in makehuman. Is it just a painful process of trial and error where you have to keep checking how the target affects the posed human later in the pipeline?

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 9:03 pm
by blindsaypatten
jujube wrote:If your mesh has triangles in it, makeclothes complains that you can't combine tris and quads, and doesn't compile it. (This implies that you could make a mesh with tris if it was all tris. I tried this once and it complained about poles instead. )


I wonder why the developers put that restriction in.

jujube wrote:My approach was to create a proxy with the new ear topology, and makeclothes doesn't have a startup mesh in the dropdown list. (I assumed you couldn't fit clothes to things that aren't on the list, but come to think of it, maybe I'll try doing that. Create mesh via maketarget, then set as human in makeclothes.)


I had a go at making clothes on a morphed mesh, I have a T-Pose target and applied it to the mesh with helpers and then separated a copy of the mesh so it was in the same position and made tights. But the arms on the generated clothes stuck out in a T-Pose when the character was in default pose. Perhaps you'll have better luck.

jujube wrote:But I did also think of creating a separate ear model and using it as clothes. I want to make a topology with no ear, just a hole or flat surface where the ear loops would be. It would then be easy to exchange it with all kinds of ear clothing items with different topologies (animal ears, pierced ears, etc)
The problem is that I would inset a hole, change it to circle shape on base.obj, but then in makehuman it would be elongated and blocky. I could create an ear clothing and link it to an ear vertex group on the human, but if I did that, it might still have the same problem. Hmm.
If an ear clothing item can be morphed with all the usual targets, then that would be pretty much the ideal scenario.

I finally have the free time to make some targets again. Just now I created a proof of concept ear, which deforms with the ear and also uses the ears as a delete group. So forget the stuff I just said about making a "no ear" topology.

There was a forum user who asked about creating inner ear structures; I keep daydreaming about that kind of anatomical visualization.


Why do I have this horrible vision of making more realistic muscles as "clothes"?

jujube wrote:Did you get your exporting rigs/weights to load properly in makehuman? Your knee weighting looked great from what I can tell and I'd happily use it.


No. There was the mystery of the vertices that were in the default weighting but not in the generated weighting, which I think was related to the problems I had with the jammers. I figured that it wouldn't be too hard to write a program that read the generated weights and then adjusted the values in the weights in the default weights file, leaving any other vertex weights alone. But at that point I convinced myself that weight painting alone was only a half solution and that a better rig would provide a more accurate mechanism. But I don't know what the capabilities of skeletons in MakeHuman are, I'm not that hopeful that it supports bone constraints and/or drivers. There is an mhskel export option in the Blender tools but the files it produces have a slightly different format than the ones in the distribution, and the generated file won't load. And the mhskel file format is missing from the file format doc page.

Hmm, I just now found the wiki page on how to create an alternative proxy/topology. So I guess the mapping between topologies is just the closest vertex in the base for each vertex.

jujube wrote:There were problems with the bone rotation planes, where you have to copy it from the default skeleton, but I don't remember if the weights displayed properly. (I think you said the clothing didn't deform but that could have been an issue with just your jammers.) There are a few user contributed rigs available, and if any of them were custom created by users, then they must have found some way to get around the bone rotation issue. Since I currently have no idea how those bone rotation planes would be determined by hand.

I also need to ask CallHarvey3d how he created his lotus pose knee corrective target. Since I don't think you could use a posed human as a referene in makehuman. Is it just a painful process of trial and error where you have to keep checking how the target affects the posed human later in the pipeline?

Re: masculinize body

PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:43 pm
by wolgade
jujube wrote:(I assumed you couldn't fit clothes to things that aren't on the list, but come to think of it, maybe I'll try doing that. Create mesh via maketarget, then set as human in makeclothes.)

You can use any however shaped human to connect your proxy. Only restriction: Your Human uses the base mesh and you have to make sure to keep vertex order on import. I did this a while back to make clothes that fitted my custom character well and without too much stretching.
jujube wrote:If an ear clothing item can be morphed with all the usual targets, then that would be pretty much the ideal scenario.

It can be morphed with any target the base mesh can be morphed with. Remember: Targets deform the base mesh. Base mesh deforms the proxy. That's the reason why you couldn't do a target for female genitals. There's simply nothing available on the base mesh that could do this job. If I wanted to do ear canals, I'd create a complete proxy. Shouldn't be harder than what I did when I created the proxies with simplified female genitals.