First, let me start by saying I love MH and I will continue using it. I am not following closely development, so excuse me if my post is out of place or is something already discussed.
Please believe I am not writing out of spite, but because I am very concerned about the future of MH in its current condition.
I am an animation and anatomy teacher. I often advise my students to pose 3D models, even when drawing 2D, just to get an idea of the right angle and the right proportions.
There used to be a time where I would tell them to forget about Daz, Poser, and the likes. I'd tell them:
- Download MH and Blender
- Tweak your character in MH, export
- Import in Blender and pose
Now;
- Download MH
- Scour the forums and download individually pieces of content you need
- If you want genitalia, guess which of the downloads you have to get. I don't know, get them all, try them, see what works
- Unzip each download, then Google 10mn to know where to put those downloads. Get a rough idea, but no specifics about where to put each type of download
- Just search forum posts and look into folders and try to figure what goes where. Try to figure also if you need to rename the downloads if you want them to show in a particular order/organization
- Find the MHX2 exporter by going to some other place, seemingly unrelated to MH
- Google 20mn to understand where to put the MH plugin. Find no clear answer on Mac, no answer at all for Linux
- Figure you have to put the plugin in the working directory of Makehuman. Maybe better to not install it through a package manager then. Or maybe copy files as root and get a warning from your package manager on next update
- Put the Blender plugin in the Blender scripts folder. Instructions on the MHX2 exporter page and in the readme are not valid for all distros. Figure out where the Blender plugin is for each distro.
- Tweak your character and export
- Import in Blender and pose
I've probably forgotten a few steps. And that's *with* my help. Without my help, you'd have to insert a bunch of "try to do x...Discover you can't...Google it for 20mn, find a bunch of outdated irrelevant threads, search more, turns out you need something installed somewhere, google it...etc".
So...These days, I tell my students to get DAZ Studio, because they can download it and hit the ground running.
Please understand, I love the work you guys are doing, and I am infinitely grateful for this tool I'm getting for free. I'm perfectly aware of the huge amount of work MH is, and it's a very neat piece of software. This rant doesn't come from a feeling of entitlement, it comes from a place of worry. For my own personal usage, and I suppose for most people involved enough in MH to hang out in the forums, those ain't real hurdles. It's fine, I've seen worse. But fact is, adoption for non-techie has become nigh impossible. I cannot in my right mind advise *anyone* I know to use MH, whereas it was all I ever talked about before.
I urge the powers that be to come back to a single package containing everything. People don't want to spend half a day setting up a software, not for using features that are expected to be bundled in.
INB4 "why would you want to..." or "just use FBX...", that's not the point. There are workarounds and solutions to everything I described above. Point is, most people won't even know what to look for.
Thank you for reading, hope I don't come off as pompous.