The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Discussions that concern the community rather than the makehuman software

The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby Xananax » Tue Jul 05, 2016 1:16 pm

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my help, you'd have to insert a bunch of "try to do x...Discover you can't...Google it for 20mn, find a bunch of outdated irrelevant threads, search more, turns out you need something installed somewhere, google it...etc".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.
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby brkurt » Tue Jul 05, 2016 7:33 pm

I'm happy to help you get over the transition period that Makehuman is going through.

Feel free to use my models; at present, I have been focusing on athletic females, but it shouldn't be a great challenge to have 12 basic models, by gender and build:

    Standard Female, Muscular Female, Overweight Female, Standard Male, Muscular Male, Overweight Male, Pregnant Standard Female; Infant Standard Female, Infant Standard Male, Elderly Standard Female, Elderly Standard Male, Obese Male

Note that I've left out Obese Female, because of problems with political correctness in the charged atmosphere of today's Internet. ;)
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby badwolf » Tue Jul 05, 2016 7:50 pm

Im not sure how it would work on Mac or any version of Linux but it would be possible in Windows to build a portable version of Blender and MakeHuman with the needed plugins installed.


Things are a bit up in the air due to some personnel changes in the Core Team.


the needed plugin is at https://bitbucket.org/ThomasMakeHuman/m ... n-exchange Thomas is part of the Core Team (im just a mutt trying to have some fun with this)
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby Xananax » Wed Jul 06, 2016 5:54 am

@badwolf, @brkurt, I thank both of you for the help offered, but you're missing the point, or more likely, I didn't explain well enough.

I'm managing. I don't actually have a problem myself. All I'm saying is most people will abandon MH way before having to register in a forum to ask a question. I know from my friends, my students, the people around me. They won't go through all the hoops to get MakeHuman installed and usable. They'll just get something else instead. Most people don't have the time, or the patience, or even the basic understanding of software required to get MH running. This is a generation used to download apps on the Android store. They don't have the faintest idea of how things work, nor are they interested to learn.

The point of my post is that MH has geared itself towards a super-small niche of techies, when there's 0 need for that (I mean, at least I can't see any good reason). This means slowing down adoption, which means slow death for a piece of software.

Again, I may be wrong about my assumption, I can only draw from my own experience. All I know is that around me, the number of MakeHuman users went from 20+ to 0. Well, 1, me.

The previous structure (everything packaged together) worked just as fine and had the added benefit of being easy to use.
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby joepal » Wed Jul 06, 2016 6:39 am

All in all, while the concerns you bring up are valid and relevant, there are also good reasons why they ended up this way. We did not do these things out of elitism or a lack of understanding for what users need, but because there were strong technical and organizational reasons for why it had to happen that way.

It isn't practically viable to package everything together. The online repo for extra assets is 400+ mb large and keeps growing. The long term solution to this is making a plugin for MH for browsing and downloading extra assets from within the interface. However, as makehuman (contrary to the other solutions you mention) is a volunteer non-commercial project without any corporate backing, things happen at a pace determined by when someone has spare time to put into the project. There is no time table for when the above will happen.

The MHX2 situation is somewhat unfortunate, I agree. There are historical reasons as to why this had to be so, and I won't bring these up again. The situation is possible to partially remedy, but some parts are outside the hands of what MH can control.

My idea is still to eventually make a community release with some commonly used features co-bundled. In particular, this would include MHX2. However, again, there is no time table set for this.
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby wolgade » Wed Jul 06, 2016 10:38 am

What a coincidence. I just replied to http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=13469 and then I saw this thread. I have to agree with Xananax. Things used to be easier for new users. Back in the old days MH did much more to attract them.
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby Xananax » Wed Jul 06, 2016 6:25 pm

The long term solution to this is making a plugin for MH for browsing and downloading extra assets from within the interface. [...] There is no time table for when the above will happen.


I understand that, which is exactly why I'm bringing this up. I've seen many times free OS projects being dropped because of lack of users. Technically, when a developer is working in her/his spare time, there shouldn't be a difference if anyone's using the software or not. In practice, it is a earth-shattering difference. More users creates motivation, discussion, brings new collaborators, and so on.

Just look at the Blender community. I've been involved in Blender almost since it became Open Source. It was a niche software, considered unprofessional. Then they changed the interface and made it more accessible. As a result, there was a rather quick ramping up of the number of users, leading to a striving community today, and a number of contributions (code, assets, UI, ...) so huge there is simply no way to keep track of it.

It's *because* MH is a free, volunteer-driven software that I think it is absolutely paramount to consider those factors first, at the possible exclusion of any other development. Here's my reasoning:

I posit that the goal of *any* software geared towards the public at large (as opposed to a very technical software geared towards a particular profession) should, first and foremost prioritize ease of use and proselytisation, and those two are co-dependent. The easier the software is to use, the more evangelists you'll get, the more evangelists you'll get, the better feedback you'll get on how to make your software easy to use.

When I say "easy to use", I don't mean just the UI, of course, but rather a "time-to-first-render" metric, which comprises everything, including ease of installation and quality of the wiki (as wolgade mentions).

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that even if you added the most magnificent character customization options in MH, selection and deformation tools unheard of before and revolutionizing the concept of 3D character modelling, it will all be for naught if you didn't nail the installation and tutorialing process in the first place, because there'll be no users to use those features. These tools and innovations will be forgotten, and MH will be one of those great pieces of software lost to history and recalled in "best 10 software of the 2000s you've never heard about" on Yt in ten years.

I think "minimal software with a solid and diverse user base" will beat "greatest software in the world with tech-minded folks who know how to run it" any day of the week.

TL,DR: Stop everything and focus on "time-to-first-render". forget new targets, better meshes, bug fixing.

I wish I could contribute. In fact, I tried to, years ago, and failed miserably due to time constraints; I won't do the same mistake. Instead, I hope that my misinformed ramblings formulated from my own narrow point of view can help in some way.
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby badwolf » Wed Jul 06, 2016 8:54 pm

the big part right now is content since i think the main program is considered "Stable'.


right now we need to get a number of artistic types on the project because just about everybody is a tech type in the project.

(and yes docs are a bit lacking right now)
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby joepal » Thu Jul 07, 2016 5:46 am

As a summary from my point of view...

For the main/core/vanilla distribution of MH:

  • Bundling significantly more assets isn't going to happen for technical reasons: The deliverable becomes too large.
  • The download assets plugin is in progress, but in very early stages. It will not necessarily need a new stable release though, so it can be released once it's available.
  • There are reasons why MHX2 isn't bundled in the main distributable. This isn't going to change.

However, for a remix/community/portableapps releases:

  • At some point a community release is going to be made. This will bundle some more things, in all likelihood at least MHX2.
  • A community release would have the download assets plugin pre-installed and enabled
  • There is work in progress for a "PortableApps" version of MH. We should consider if this should bundle MXH2.
  • None of this is going to void the need for a user to know how to install and enable a plugin in blender. We have no influence over the blender side.

For the documentation: Community efforts requires that the community makes an effort. Me, Rob and Aranuvir do what we can for the docs, but in the longer run we need more manpower to improve the docs further. Everyone with a forum login can edit the wiki. It's just a question of logging in and starting to write. You don't need to ask for permission or discuss changes before you add them. All pages have a revision history anyway, so in the worst case changes can be reverted.

And otherwise I basically agree with badwolf. The existing userbase benefit primarily from an expanded set of functional assets and plugins. Enabling these things (constructing the repo and promoting it for example), has thus been my focus during the last year.
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
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Re: The new structure of Makehuman is a huge hindrance

Postby badwolf » Thu Jul 07, 2016 12:26 pm

As for my part in this if i can pull the bits together i will host a "some assembly required" bundle with

1 MakeHuman Portable
2 the combined plugins for MH
3 Blender Portable <---- will most likely be a link to the Papps site
4 Gimp Portable <---- likewise
5 the combined plugins for Blender
6 a small number of "glue" plugins
7 a copy of the Community Assets
8 a few "bonus" assets

and of course some Docs on how all of it works together
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