Manuel leaving

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Manuel leaving

Postby joepal » Fri Sep 16, 2016 7:08 am

As may have been apparent for long-time followers of the MakeHuman community, Manuel Bastioni has been less active during the last year.

Manuel is the original author of MakeHuman and has been involved in MakeHuman for more than a decade. However, for personal and administrative reasons, he has now decided to leave the project officially too.

Since this is the way things have been moving for a while, the transition has been possible to make in good order although some details still remain.

Before releasing 1.1.0 all copyright to the source code and the bundled assets were explicitly transfered to Joel Palmius, Jonas Hauquier and Data Collection AB (DCAB) jointly. DCAB is now listed as official legal contact for MakeHuman.

Most in-house services (such as the bug tracker, the forum, the asset repo and so on) are hosted by DCAB.

Some details still remain, mainly the issue with the original domain name. For various reasons, I have no control over makehuman.org: I cannot redirect the domain, nor edit things on the existing page. This is a problem, but it will have to worked around. In the short term, I intend to steer traffic towards makehumancommunity.org instead, since I have full access to that.

Personally, I remain dedicated to keep the MakeHuman project and community going. To ensure the long-term viability of MH I have slowly started to recruit more team members for various parts of the project and the community. Some of these you will have seen with green names on the forums. Others mainly do things behind the scenes without making much fuzz.

As this statement is mainly a means to publish facts that are already in effect, no big changes are to be expected in the near future. In my view things are progressing in a mostly pleasant manner as they are, and there is no reasons to start rocking the boat.

This said, we will need to recruit artists to keep up work with the base mesh and bundled targets.

Manuel has seen this post before it was published and approved its contents.
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby loki1950 » Fri Sep 16, 2016 2:31 pm

As you stated Joel no surprise but I would like to express many thanks and good luck to Manuel his contributions to makehuman have been pivotal.

Enjoy the Choice :)
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby wolgade » Fri Sep 16, 2016 5:14 pm

This doesn't come as a surprise. I suspected this to happen, better to have happened, in some previous posts. Anyway, I would have liked to be wrong. Manuel was a driving force for this project. He is a great artist and it won't be easy to find a replacement. At least, after his decision is official, the project can start looking for one.

joepal wrote:In my view things are progressing in a mostly pleasant manner as they are, and there is no reasons to start rocking the boat.


I don't subscribe to this point of view. The last year was a year of stagnation and a lot of frustration in many ways. Forum activity decreased heavily. Don't get me wrong: You do and did a lot to keep the project alive. The user repo is something we should have had years ago. It allows users to enhance MH and make it more attractive, but that doesn't change the fact that one of the heads is missing. It doesn't change the fact that there's no one to work on the issues and goals defined on the bugtracker and it doesn't change the fact that new users land on an outdated page when they use a search engine to look for MH. At least the last point should be solvable now and yes it should be solved.
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby Aranuvir » Sun Sep 18, 2016 10:54 am

At first I would like to thank Manuel, too. He has done an outstanding artwork and will hardly be replaceable. My best wishes to him and his new project.

Unfortunately I must agree in parts with wolgade. Currently MakeHuman has reached a level of limited use to me. The software still refuses to run on my Windows installation (workaround: uninstall the dedicated AMD-graphics-driver, which is not really a solution). And on Linux I'm now suffering of issue #1054. The issue didn't occur until Ubuntu 16.04 (respectively Debian testing). Just pointing with the finger to Intel, stating a bad Opengl implementation seems falling too short to me. If things continue developing in this way, I fear, MakeHuman soon will not work on any of my systems anymore. I could imagine there are many other users with similar experiences who just uninstall the software without leaving any comment on the bugtracker. Hopefully this isn't the future of MakeHuman.

Sorry for being a little direct here ...
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby RobBaer » Tue Sep 20, 2016 1:23 pm

I have already expressed my appreciation to Manuel in another venue, but i want to again thank him publicly in this forum for all he has done to evolve this wonderful project. I have not only benefited from the program itself, but from all the things I have learned in the process of helping to grow it. The chance to work with Manuel was not only an incredible education in 3D art, but also an education in how to share a passion with the whole world. Thank you Manuel as I know you have vowed to watch over us even as you disengage.

That said, we as a community are in charge of MH's destiny. By each of us giving back to the community in line with our own talents and abilities, the program will continue to grow and prosper. Of course, we will not be the same without Manuel, but like Joel, I am determined to keep contributing to its future growth and maintenance of MakeHuman.

This is a great time for those of you with some spare energy to double down on the MH community as we turn a new corner in our life.
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby joepal » Tue Sep 20, 2016 2:11 pm

As a general note... While it is true that the central code repo hasn't seen much activity lately, it isn't as if the project as a whole is in a complete standstill.

Out of my head, the following is for this year:

  • MH 1.1.0 was released
  • As mentioned, there is quite a lot of activity in the user contribution repos
  • Rob has started (and gotten pretty far with) moving MH to python 3. See https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman_python3
  • The MHAPI project is underfoot and works in principle although it needs to be expanded quite a lot
  • We have a synchronization plugin for blender which is able to sync both the mesh shape and poses "online" without re-exporting from MH
  • We have an asset downloader plugin
  • Aranuvir has made a portable release for both MH and the blendertools plugins (I'm planning to make a formal release with these soonish)
  • The wiki has seen quite a lot of love, see for example Rob's sections on 3DS http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/ ... esk_3DSMax
  • Jonas has been at LibreGraphics and had meeting with other related people, for example the Valentina project.
  • Debian has adopted MH 1.1.x for debian unstable, meaning it'll end up being a part of both ubuntu and all other debian derivates (until now a four year old alpha was the only thing available from the distro repos)
  • For ubuntu users there is now a PPA

Yes, there are some annoying bugs that would need to be fixed in the core code. And yes, we're a bit short on man power, particularly on the artist side. But outside that, I'm viewing MH as a pretty mature and stable product.

Personally I'm choosing to focus on expanding the tools and services surrounding the main application rather than the main application as such, as I feel that has more impact.
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby duststorm » Wed Sep 28, 2016 6:39 pm

Hi all,

Time for me to pitch in :)

These are turbulent times for the project, with many changes happening. But this is not the first time. During the course of MakeHuman's 10 years of existence there have been other setbacks, however the project has endured. I believe it will survive this as well. MakeHuman is stronger than ever, with a stable release and a healthy codebase to build on in the future.

I want to thank Manuel again for inspiring and bringing this project to life. In these last few years, we've had a lot of communication, planning the future of the project, figuring out technical details on how to realize features, and establishing the vision for the project. It was a fun and interesting time and a fruitful collaboration. How his participation in the project will be in the future, I cannot tell, but what I can tell you is that the vision for the project does not die with Manuel leaving the team as active contributor. There's still enough active contributors to steer the project towards the future, with the same vision as its original creator.

Even though I haven't been very active on the project lately, I have no intentions of abandoning it. In fact I mean to get back to the nitty gritty of writing code and working on the next stable release very soon. With many cool features still on the roadmap, there's enough to be done and not get bored ;)

As Joel mentioned, I have done a talk together with the people of the Valentina project. I still believe that many cool things can be done in collaboration, and am going to investigate new ways of using and integrating MakeHuman with different workflows in the maker community, the 3D scanning and printing community, and creative pipelines in general.
Now that MakeHuman itself is stable, it's time to look further, and focus on artistic uses, integration with existing tools, expandability, documentation and tutorials, improving the community assets and tools. For that we will of course also need help from you: the community. :)
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby monkeychops » Wed Oct 19, 2016 8:59 pm

I just wanted to add to this...

I think MH is held back by its license. AGPL is very restrictive and prevents the code from being incorporated into other projects. The limitation of the output only being under CC0 if produced with the official build of MH makes it even worse, because it actively discourages people from changing or improving MH in any way, because then the exception doesn't apply to their modified version and they can't use the models.
As it stands, the only people that can/will hack on the code and add improvements to it are those that have a direct interest in being part of the MH team.
If the license were changed to something more liberal, such as the MIT license, then the tool could be extremely useful in lots of other cases and could be integrated into games, commercial products and perhaps automated to output models via a web service or some such so people could use it to make online character creator tools. That would then bring a lot more people into the community and lead to a lot more people investing their time and effort into contributing and improving the core.
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby Tanny » Thu Oct 20, 2016 8:53 am

Speaking as and for the know nothing nube contingent...

1) The main thing I would like to see is an expansion of the character asset library, along with better instruction on how to use the assets. As example, each asset page might contain such instructions specific to that asset. I must admit I'm about to explore an alternative to MH, primarily in the hopes of finding a greater selection of character assets.

2) It might help generate interest to create a character library full of MH characters that can be immediately downloaded. As example, http://tf3dm.com/3d-models/characters/

3) I've downloaded many characters from the site linked just above, and almost none of them work correctly in Cheetah3D, whereas MH characters require only minor tweaks, if any. It might help generate interest to test MH characters in as many 3D apps as possible, and then prominently brag about the list of 3D apps where MH characters have been proven to work.

Point being, the software is already pretty darn cool just the way it is. And of course the price is perfect. Perhaps the future of MH depends more upon marketing and the asset library than it does further software development?
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Re: Manuel leaving

Postby brkurt » Sat Oct 22, 2016 2:46 am

Tanny wrote:Speaking as and for the know nothing nube contingent...

1) The main thing I would like to see is an expansion of the character asset library, along with better instruction on how to use the assets. As example, each asset page might contain such instructions specific to that asset. I must admit I'm about to explore an alternative to MH, primarily in the hopes of finding a greater selection of character assets.

2) It might help generate interest to create a character library full of MH characters that can be immediately downloaded. As example, http://tf3dm.com/3d-models/characters/

3) I've downloaded many characters from the site linked just above, and almost none of them work correctly in Cheetah3D, whereas MH characters require only minor tweaks, if any. It might help generate interest to test MH characters in as many 3D apps as possible, and then prominently brag about the list of 3D apps where MH characters have been proven to work.

Point being, the software is already pretty darn cool just the way it is. And of course the price is perfect. Perhaps the future of MH depends more upon marketing and the asset library than it does further software development?


Manuel originally designed MH to work inside Blender, as his own Lab still does. MH is under the AGPL license, and has always leaned toward open standards.
Cheetah3d is very Mac-centered, and anything Mac has always been the last to be developed. If anything, the push is toward a mobile app using the Unity programming language.

MH is unique in that it covers as many bases as it does; I'm astounded how well it integrates with Marvelous Designer, a software package that is a proprietary and commercial as it gets.

In terms of assets, there is a yet no standard for clothes that all agree on; we've got to work with MakeClothes as is. The big problem right now for me is that Marvelous Designer is far and away the best clothing design program, but it breaks the MH paradigm of 'quads only'. To that point, Duststorm and others are working to integrate the fledgling program Valentina into MH and Blender. :o

The bottom line as I see it: what will be the standard workflow in 2020? By then, mouse and keyboard will be on the way out, OLED screens will let us work in full life-size scale, everything will be renderable in Cycles; most artists will finish their work using online renderfarms in a cloud somewhere. :geek:

The point is, which programs and platforms are the ones that the new programmers comming to MH will want to work in?

I await you answer. (quote from Klaatu). ;)
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