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Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Tue Feb 28, 2017 1:21 am
by O_J
Hi all, I have my bvh Rig found here https://www.dropbox.com/s/m8z6cr2q3mbd3q7/MyRig.bvh?dl=0. I want to Add it to the makehuman rigs and assign correct vertices to each bone to be able to export good deformed meshes.

What I did is that I navigated to the rigs folder, then made a copy of both cmu_mb.mhskel and cmu_mb.thumb and renamed them to myrig_mb.mhskel and myrig_mb.mhskel. I'm not sure what to do next to correctly create myrig and fits the human model correctly on it. Any advice please? Thank you.

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 9:10 am
by RobBaer
It's not clear to me what you are asking.

.bvh files contain animations for a bone hierarchy and are used in single frame format within MH to specify poses. The way to pose an MH character is to use the MakeHuman Blender tool called Makewalk in conjunction with an existing .bvh file pose for a similar skeleton to apply the pose to the MakeHuman figure.

If instead, you have posed an MH figure in blender with the default rig, you would export the pose as .bvh, saving it to c:/%user%/documents/makehuman/v1/data/poses (on Windows), and then creating a .thumb file (png format) and an appropriate metadata file which are savedin the same folder. This is usable within MH.

If you have a new skeleton hierarchy stored but a standard A pose for which you want to create rig weights to the MakeHuman mesh, you will have to do that outside MakeHuman, for example in Blender.

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 1:06 pm
by O_J
RobBaer wrote:It's not clear to me what you are asking.

.bvh files contain animations for a bone hierarchy and are used in single frame format within MH to specify poses. The way to pose an MH character is to use the MakeHuman Blender tool called Makewalk in conjunction with an existing .bvh file pose for a similar skeleton to apply the pose to the MakeHuman figure.

If instead, you have posed an MH figure in blender with the default rig, you would export the pose as .bvh, saving it to c:/%user%/documents/makehuman/v1/data/poses (on Windows), and then creating a .thumb file (png format) and an appropriate metadata file which are savedin the same folder. This is usable within MH.

If you have a new skeleton hierarchy stored but a standard A pose for which you want to create rig weights to the MakeHuman mesh, you will have to do that outside MakeHuman, for example in Blender.



I'm just using the bvh file as I want to have my own rig inside makehuman. So I navigated to the rigs folder, then made a copy of both cmu_mb.mhskel and cmu_mb.thumb and renamed them to myrig_mb.mhskel and myrig_mb.mhskel. So now if I open makehuman there will be two identical rigs one cmu and one myrig. Now I want to know how to use the structure of mybvh to construct the rig of myrig in makehuman instead of the cmu rig? and how to assign the correct vertices of the model to the correct bone of rig so that deformations looks good?

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 7:48 pm
by RobBaer
O_J wrote:I'm just using the bvh file as I want to have my own rig inside makehuman. So I navigated to the rigs folder, then made a copy of both cmu_mb.mhskel and cmu_mb.thumb and renamed them to myrig_mb.mhskel and myrig_mb.mhskel. So now if I open makehuman there will be two identical rigs one cmu and one myrig. Now I want to know how to use the structure of mybvh to construct the rig of myrig in makehuman instead of the cmu rig? and how to assign the correct vertices of the model to the correct bone of rig so that deformations looks good?


MakeHuman is not used for rigging. The cmu rig is made especially to work with the .bvh animations in the carnegie-melon collection and also works well with the female AACAD collection. It was meticulously fit to the MakeHuman mesh in Blender. Rigging is a very complex process well beyond the scope of this forum. You can find a variety of tutorials for Blender rigging (and probably other 3D software rigging) on the web. Try googling "rigging in Blender"

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 6:28 am
by O_J
RobBaer wrote:MakeHuman is not used for rigging. The cmu rig is made especially to work with the .bvh animations in the carnegie-melon collection and also works well with the female AACAD collection. It was meticulously fit to the MakeHuman mesh in Blender. Rigging is a very complex process well beyond the scope of this forum. You can find a variety of tutorials for Blender rigging (and probably other 3D software rigging) on the web. Try googling "rigging in Blender"


I'm still not sure if you understand what I want to do or what the problem with my question is? I want to set my own skeleton in makehuman and adjust it's weights properly to be able to export meshes from it directly without the need of blender to do that, just set up the skeleton once here with correct mesh/bone weighting and use it, but I'm not sure how it can be done, that's why I'm asking for help and assistance.

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 8:54 am
by joepal
Creating a makehuman skeleton is a somewhat intimidating task, largely because the tools are very much not user friendly, and mostly undocumented.

You would need to produce a .mhskel file (for the rig as such) and (optionally) a .mhw file (for the weight painting).

You can take a look at how the game engine skeleton look here: https://github.com/makehumancommunity/o ... ine.mhskel

The only tool for this is "io_mhrigging_mhskel" in the makehuman-utils repo: https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman-utils. This is a blender plugin which adds a mhskel export option in blender.

Running this, you can create a crude, unfinished mhskel file. You will still need to edit this manually (with a text editor) to remove null values for rotations that the exporter script could not figure out automatically.

Re: Add my Custom Rig and Assign vertices

PostPosted: Sat May 16, 2020 7:42 am
by Untalented
HI Everyone

I would like also to add my custom rigs due to this problem .
I have been trying to animate the charatcter created in MakeHuman in Blender with the following settings:
- Cmu compliant rig (skeleton)
- starting in T pose

I have tried to use the CMU bvh file and notice a few differences:
1- The resting T pose is different . The CMU restong pose oppose to starting pose have spread legs which give bad angles.
2- The hips and other bbones are different . despite being able to copy animation data or action from the bvh rig , it won't work.

How would be possible to change or reimport the CMU compliant rig to a more compliant one.