Recruiting for Makehumans Future!

[Elvaerwyn]

Greetings Fellow Makehuman Artists,

This is a wonderful and vibrantly diverse group of individuals creating in so many different capacities its truly astounding!

The makehuman standalone program is aging and in need of a serious overhaul to keep her current and viable going forward. I know that our software is used constantly, and in fact needed by many different people in a vast array of ways.
The last thing any of us would want to happen is that the software ever should become deprecated and abandoned in her current state. That being said, going forward, there is much to do.

~I speak for our team now to appeal to our coders and programmers in our group. We are recruiting any and all able bodied individuals who have the time and skill sets necessary to lighten the load on our devs!

For clarity, our requirements for team members in this capacity is:

Knowledge, in part or whole in the following:

-Python programming(need not be perfect)
-Open GL Basics
-SQL-database basic knowledge
-understanding of 3d algorithms(ie: vectors and matrices)
-numpy
-kivy

Also artists and content creators(3d/body etc and 2d ui et)-are always welcome!

Please give this some thought and feel free to reply to this post, or answer me in private makehuman message mail, I will be happy to discuss this further with you.

Thank you for your time in reading and consideration,

Elv and Devs of Makehuman

[jorgeo]

I'm experienced in Python programming and SQL databases. MakeHuman has been good to me, so I'd like to give back as I can

[Elvaerwyn]

I'm experienced in Python programming and SQL databases. MakeHuman has been good to me, so I'd like to give back as I can

This is wonderful! I will message you in pm in coming days ! Cannot wait to speak with you on our plans and look forward to working with you going forward!

Elv

~>Also recruitment is open to all, anyone should feel free to message me or punduck or make post on this forum page!

[Ricardo2020]

I am not a programmer, but I can test things and report my findings.

I can review targeting and comment on what works and what does not, so that makes me a troubleshooter of sorts.

What I would like to see is added detail to get at wrinkles and folds in the mesh as a result of aging and obesity. I would also like to see gravity added to the model so that things sag realistically as a result of not only the body shape but also when posing deforms the figure.

Elbow joints and knee joints need much love since certain poses deform them in very bad ways when taken into some sitting and action sequences.

I would also like to see the animation tab get some love so that the frame slider actually works, allowing for multiple frame BVH handling.

I am on here a lot, so I am ready and able to be of whatever service I can provide.

Happy human making to all....

[SaltyCowdawg]

Hi,

I can also assist with testing. I also now type very slowly since one of the side effects of my disability has been the loss of my touch typing skills. Typing slow means slow readers can easily keep up.

Keep in mind though I have three strokes in the last two years so my programming ability has been trashed, an I've never been a Python coder. Most of the scripts I've ever written began with

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;



Another thing certainly do is quality checks on contributed assets for things like file paths and "does it scale? which are the two most common things I see go wrong.

Is there a Jira or equivalent to file issues on?

[punkduck]

Hi there.

yes internally the software is aging and we mostly have problems to correct the handling with libraries. And since years no new features. I am using blender plugins as well, but I think the intuitive idea of MakeHuman (which is more or less a morphing system) should stay. We have some things where I was always unhappy.

1) we have a base mesh, just one. I replaced it by the same + wings and fishtail at the end and we (Elv & me) were able to do e.g. fantasy characters, I will not do the error to throw this mesh away, but with a simple folder structure I wanted to add more than one mesh. I could even add my horse or cat ... the principle would be the same. So I want to use it as a base.

Since we have all the morphs this will not change too much. With one exception of course: we use the same targets often ... (check github, same length, same morphs) ... when I tried to make them symmetric it was a lot of work to figure out where I need to work and where I only need to copy the file.

2) I wanted to separate the view-mode similar to blender, in a simple mode one to create the character and one to render it. But of course only with OpenGL shaders and some light settings, perspective and a transparent background for those, who use the system without blender but insert characters in GIMP or other graphical programs.

3) bvh poses can also be a sequence (it works with MakeHuman now), Some people proved it by saving 250 times the same frame, Makehuman always loaded all but of course it only showed first one .. if an animation would work? Well I tried with kivy (instead of QT, just an idea atm) this weekend and they rotate Blender Suzanne. I hoped I could do it with my gumby .. I was happy that I was able to rotate the head of my character. The problem is, that OpenGL has some limits ... It must be buffered, when more than 64k indices/vertices are there. So this code I will re-use in a way.

4) the file-caches I want to exchange with python builtin sqlite ... so database knowledge would help, it is not an oracle or mariadb/mysql ... we need to keep the project small, otherwise we will have new dependencies. But also for selection of clothes we would have a better method with a database. I made a concept in the developer forum (a part invisible for normal users) how this could be solved. So a user can download an asset and add additional information for his own choice. A tiny bit I started with the tag manager in makeclothes already to have at least some common keywords.

5) bone-constraints I wanted to add. Ricardo: not only knees and elbows. I got my Anissa character in unreal engine (the engine "normally" does not support keep volume) but the lower arm will be extremly thin when she shows the palm of her hands and when she sits down ... well ... buttocks are gone . So in both cases "distance bones" driven by other bones might help. In unreal engine/metahuman there are some extra bones, but these are not animated by user, these are normally driven by constraints. For the knees I tried a double joint .. so one small bone where the kneecap is. The distance bones also can be used for jiggling btw.

6) and here a few other things. Did you ever notice our characters are a bit cross-eyed? Or how the small cubes for bone-endpoints will behave when we morph the character. Why is our waist-line going up and down and it is hard to create pants for both genders? Why are custom morphs only one-directional? Why can't we add a new nose-slider not to the other ones etc. etc.

Hey Salty, change that to e.g.

Code: Select all

 
#!/usr/bin/python3


strict is not known to python. Python always complaints. It complaints so much that people give us a stack trace instead of "cannot open file xyz.obj" ... yes I am also perl programmer but I try to get rid of it, because it mostly assumes things (like empty strings, or values of 0 per definition) which sometimes creates weird things (like empty database entries).

github can be used for that, for programming it is good enough I think.

Jira with epics and stories ... I try to avoid that in my company where I work. We have like 20 agile project managers, scrum masters.. and ehm ... well 1 and a half programmer where one is in vacation ... and the half one is unfortunately blocked by dailies, sprints, sprint plannings, reviews and retrospectives ... that reason why CASE was invented to make this guy working with goals, since his productivity is so small because his own bad organization

Sorry could not resist to write that. But yes after a brainstorming we should agree on what we want to realize. As you can see, my ideas were not that different.

[tomcat]

Greetings!

This is great news!! It is glad that this wonderful program continues to develop!

The direction of development, in general, is roughly clear. I would just like to clarify, just in case. Do I understand correctly that the general concept, focused only on artists, remains? There won't be any real bio-mechanical modeling of the human body?

1. If the ability to simulate critters is added, that's just great! Especially if it retains the exclusive MH feature of being able to set an age. And fantastic critters, of course, would be nice.

2. It would be convenient, if possible, to add more viewports. It would be very nice if there were at least two windows. Excellent, if they separated (that you could move the panels and windows to another monitor).

3. Is it supposed to be possible, at least in a very simplified way, to create poses in MH itself?

4. It might be a good idea to divide clothes into categories (underwear, outerwear, shoes, accessories), as is done on the site.

5. One could pay attention to the Z-Anatomy project. The BIOMECHANICS section has an anatomically correct skeleton in Blender format, with bone limitations. The presence of ribs may make it possible to implement breathing in videos and games.



UE already has its own character generator.

6. And it would be great if it would be possible to set numerical values, in addition to sliders, which has been requested for a long time.

Something strange is going on with the site. Sometimes it is inaccessible. In this thread I can't attach pictures.

[punkduck]

I should take a look on that anatomic blender tool maybe for some ideas. But we can't change the complete concept.

1. If the ability to simulate critters is added, that's just great! Especially if it retains the exclusive MH feature of being able to set an age. And fantastic critters, of course, would be nice.

Critters? We use the word mostly for little monsters But if you mean infants/children yes. If you mean little monsters. Yes in a way, also. One could even add a special base mesh for these monsters, But not out of the box.

I will NOT throw away old features that make sense. Be aware there were predecessors of the hm08 mesh. And first people we will scare away when the old mesh is no longer available.
And for people of different ages, thin, thick, small, young, old? Of course it should work. We are not a DAZ clone just to create nice looking females or males.

2. It would be convenient, if possible, to add more viewports. It would be very nice if there were at least two windows. Excellent, if they separated (that you could move the panels and windows to another monitor).

I would work with more windows to have a viewport in a render pose (manually updated in first version or maybe more often) and one or more for construction. I am still looking for ideas. Could be that selections will have an own window like the asset browser in Unreal Engine.

What I don't like are some of the systems, where one has 20 possibilities to uncouple windows like in GIMP, Blender or UE. That I would keep simpler but in a way possible. Especially because I never was able to put that back into original state

3. Is it supposed to be possible, at least in a very simplified way, to create poses in MH itself?

it could be, at least in the viewport, yes. Because loading a bvh and rotating bones manually is not really different

4. It might be a good idea to divide clothes into categories (underwear, outerwear, shoes, accessories), as is done on the site.

the clothes you can divide by whatever you want, that was what I wrote about Makeclothes. I added a tag manager so that people were able to use predefined tags, Since not all people do that and the old version never supported that, one should be able to add own attributes (so classify) the clothes. These classification should result in groups which one can select. Simple things like male/female/both but also like "wonder woman" or whatever you want.

5. One could pay attention to the Z-Anatomy project. The BIOMECHANICS section has an anatomically correct skeleton in Blender format, with bone limitations. The presence of ribs may make it possible to implement breathing in videos and games.

I work with a different skeleton, yes. My character also looks as if she breathes. Of course it is not anatomically correct. Do not forget that especially males of a certain age like me use more the abdominal breathing. To simulate rips correctly would be a lot of effort, but to approximate it ... my main problem is usually upperarm + shoulder section.

6. And it would be great if it would be possible to set numerical values, in addition to sliders, which has been requested for a long time.

I do not want 500 sliders, 2000 buttons + 500 input boxes in one page, and then a scroll bar of 1cm to scroll down a meter etc etc-. When you select a value to change I would do sth. like to present all features for this button/value, an input box will be there for sure. I already have that on old MakeHuman. But here I wanted to use a different concept.

Greetings
punkduck

[guenrij2]

hi @Elvaerwyn I am Guenrij Silva and I want to collaborate with the Make Human Project as a 3d artist > https://guenrij.wixsite.com/3dart https://www.instagram.com/silbender/ Cheers!

[tomcat]

Critters? We use the word mostly for little monsters

I was referring to monsters maturing… and aging… but maybe that's not a good idea, since the rules for monsters maturing are different from those for regular normal living creatures.

And first people we will scare away when the old mesh is no longer available.

Legacy addiction very often gets in the way of development. This applies to programs to the fullest extent. In addition to retaining old users, it is good to think about attracting new users. And, will all the old users give up on the new features? And how many MakeHuman users fled to MetaHuman?

We are not a DAZ clone

Not a clone, but competitors are an important nuance.

What I don't like are some of the systems, where one has 20 possibilities to uncouple windows like in GIMP, Blender or UE.

It's actually quite handy when you can customize the panels "for yourself". And "running" through the whole screen to select one garment, then switch tags, select another garment, repeat… — is not very convenient.

I added a tag manager so that people were able to use predefined tags, Since not all people do that…

Namely, that "not all people do that". Often tags are neglected, so they can't replace categories.

…the abdominal breathing

It's not a good term and bad breath. It's not breathing with the abdomen, it's breathing with the lungs. "Bottom" breathing just means that all the lungs are not used completely and, therefore, the blood gets less oxygen. But it is possible to realize normal breathing first, and then to think how to do deviations.

my main problem is usually upperarm + shoulder section.

The only difficulty here is that they have to move relative to each other in an interconnected way. And the bones are controlled separately.

I do not want 500 sliders, 2000 buttons + 500 input boxes in one page

Why one page? All the settings are already categorized by tabs. All that is needed is a value entry box beside the name.