Body study as seen from my perspective

Images of characters done with MakeHuman

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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby punkduck » Sat Dec 15, 2018 10:06 am

Mindfront wrote:
Evi and Kamden sent these images from their continuing romantic adventure, travel from Germany to Sweden (HDRi's not from Sweden, from https://hdrihaven.com).


Considering the short days we now have (especially in the North) both scenes are more end-of-summer. But your pictures are rather complex with curtains and quilts etc. Now I see how the different scaling works on the hair. I had to make Kamdens hair a bit longer for my scenes (Evi is a "decimeter" girl). When you make her smaller the hair style changed from beach waves to "weather-styled" :)

Mindfront wrote:Bellatrix helped making the engagement ring box especially for this scene. First I thought of using same clothes as in punkduck's image series but both had to change clothes for this scene.


It also makes no sense wearing the same clothes for weeks. They start to smell, y'know :lol: But the clothes fit to the scene.

Mindfront wrote:Thank you punkduck, and for the idea of making this image series. Trippel :D


Last not least I hoped for scenes like this. Although makehuman could be used for all types of characters it was mainly designed for normal human characters. So working together shows me how other people use it, create scenes etc. ... If more life-like or more fantasy-like, I learned a lot the last two years.

I am happy that only a copy of Evi left Germany. There are some women who left my country and emigrate to Sweden. One was obviously very successful and became queen Silvia :)

But as I mentioned somewhere, Evi is modelled after an East European girl. So she isn't German at all, it is all fantasy and so I will use her for further scenes as well.
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby joepal » Sat Dec 15, 2018 2:11 pm

punkduck wrote:I am happy that only a copy of Evi left Germany. There are some women who left my country and emigrate to Sweden. One was obviously very successful and became queen Silvia :)


If you want to discourage them, you could mention the -15C, the half a meter of snow and the four hours of daylight...

smhi.PNG
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby Mindfront » Sat Jan 26, 2019 10:48 pm

Before starting to test the new alpha release of MakeHuman and experimenting with other users addons and scripts I decided to do one last (I think) effort on my character deformations. As previous mentioned I use corrective smooth modifier to adjust the characters deformations but it needs a vertex group to avoid smoothen certain parts. Then I got a tip how to counteract the ugly deformation when rising the arms and "Preserve Volume" in Armature Modifier is activated. One can avoid using "Preserve Volume" but it can make big difference when doing certain poses, but only together with corrective smooth.
Arms_up_examples.jpg
Deformation corrections in Blender

There is some other threads about this topic, but this is my solution and made to be pretty simple for experienced Blender users. All my character use the "default (none)" topology and the rig "Default no toes" as well as the dummy for compatibility reason.

When imported a new character using mhx2 and no special settings, I append this dummy character and transfer (only) my own two vertex groups and corrective shape-keys. Then add all modifiers and assign respectively vertex group. My modifier stack looks like this, (the settings for the corrective smooth modifier is character dependent but this is the most often used.)
Modifier_stack.jpg
Modifier stack

The part that I dont manage to get decent is the knees when bending the legs. Not even with the corrective shape-keys. Some close-up previews are planned. This .blend file includes the dummy with my vertex groups and corrective shape-keys, and modifier stack. Press play, the character is animated ;)
Dummy_transfer_weights_and_shape_keys.zip
Blend file including only a basic character to use to transfer two vertex groups and shape-keys
(2.25 MiB) Downloaded 1434 times

The problem when changing deformations of a character using modifiers in Blender is that the clothes wont deform exactly like the character. Sometimes its enough to the clothes add "Surface Deform" modifier and bind it to the character's body. Or if adventurous use cloth simulator. I still prefer doing it manually using proportional edit and sculpt.

To test the result I did some ballet posing by trying to mimic poses from real dancers. The result got better than expected and the poses was quite fast to make. It was ment to be only Jennifer but Bellatrix started to create a male ballet costume and wanted Kamden to participate. While Bellatrix worked on Kamden's costume I decided to improve the ballet dress.
Mindfront_-_Ballet_Swan_Lake_amateur_performance_01.jpg
Mindfront_-_Ballet_Swan_Lake_amateur_performance_02.jpg
Mindfront_-_Ballet_Swan_Lake_amateur_performance_03.jpg
Mindfront_-_Ballet_Swan_Lake_amateur_performance_04.jpg

In the last image, Jennifer's right armpit looks bad, but I am overall satisfied. It's possible to do manually corrections or another shape-key if in the future need to do this kind of extra ordinary arm pose. Or back to the drawing board and adjust the weighting for corrective smooth or preserve volume.

When doing the texturing for the costume, I tried yet another aproach to make the folds and wrinkles, much faster and effective than all my previous methods. More on that later.
Ballet_Costume_Preview_large.jpg
Ballet Costume large preview

This "Ballet Costume" and material is now available:
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/cloth ... stume.html
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/conte ... erial.html

---Wishes the community and especially all asset contributors and the MakeHuman developers/team a very great year 2019---
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby wolgade » Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:51 am

This is interesting, having two armature modifiers on the stack. I never would have thought about this. Thanks for sharing your ideas. Armpits and raised arms are a nightmare.
Mindfront wrote:In the last image, Jennifer's right armpit looks bad, but I am overall satisfied. It's possible to do manually corrections or another shape-key if in the future need to do this kind of extra ordinary arm pose. Or back to the drawing board and adjust the weighting for corrective smooth or preserve volume.

I think there's simply not enough geometry in this region to get decent armpit deformation.
Mindfront wrote:When doing the texturing for the costume, I tried yet another aproach to make the folds and wrinkles, much faster and effective than all my previous methods. More on that later.

A cliffhanger, great. :D Seriously, I'm very curious.

BTW: Great images as always.
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby punkduck » Mon Jan 28, 2019 9:01 pm

Hi Mindfront,

from a technical perspective a more perfect version especially for shoulder, knee etc. region is desirable. Most things I tried also have disadvantages, e.g. corrective smooth destroyed the inframammary fold and the character again looked a bit like "boob-surgery" :shock: . Of course the use of weighted groups where smoothing should be done might help us in future. Since I am able to do own skeletons using the base mesh there also might be some techniques to use extra bones (like you wrote in the private mail on the horse I did). I am collecting (and also trying) most of the ideas.

A lot of ideas also from Elvaerwyn, Wolgade, yourself but also from articles in the forum show me, that we should be able to maybe append some extras to an export/import pipeline between Blender and MakeHuman. Aranuvir e.g. thought of different materials, I think of things I always add.

The JSON layer between export and import could e.g. get an additional information from "outside", which can be added, when you e.g. need additional features. This is also not making problems with compatibility. It is concept work, but ideas are welcome. It is like that: all unknown new JSON objects should be ignored by the importer but we are free to create new features, the importer is free to use them. The complete JSON format should be documented then. This is how systems communicate in the company I work for (partly also using XML or more modern google buffer protocol which is able to do it faster because of less overhead).

When you consider other programs, there are similar problems. Sometimes not so obvious because the characters are moving fast like in games or sim-world ...

This male clothes and also the poses look very natural. Very well done, these poses show what is possible with the mesh.

Btw.: It is quite a long time I had done an own asset (besides of the skeleton) I just discovered ...
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby rwman » Tue May 14, 2019 1:17 pm

Mindfront wrote:Here is my (almo[*]st final) Blender Cycles skin material. With a right balanced specular/roughness texture it should look decent right out the box, but if needed I have left some muted Color ramps to adjust the specular, roughness (specular and roughnes is the same texture) and skin color. Important to know is that this material and settings is in scale 1:1 metric.

(As this skin material is special made to work with my tre textures (not included), four with the wet texture mask (inkluded in the blender-file). I add it here instead of in the user contributed area to not confuse anyone this material work without some effort making at least one 4096 detailed specular texture and preferable a normal map.
The specular texture should be made the old way, black means no specular max roughness and white full specular and mirror.)

Mindfront_Skin_Material_Blender_Cycles.blend


Anyone managed to make this blend file to work? I opened it and only see weird solid purple skin when rendered: https://i.imgur.com/wJifn7d.png
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby bogdan666 » Tue May 14, 2019 2:26 pm

Pink Skin means there is no texture. You can assign new textures in blender. Just import a texture from the corresponding makehuman folder (skintexture from skin folder and hairtexture from hair folder etc., but only those that fit the uv map layout (ponyhair texture to pony hair mesh etc.)
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby rwman » Wed May 15, 2019 3:06 pm

bogdan666 wrote:Pink Skin means there is no texture. You can assign new textures in blender. Just import a texture from the corresponding makehuman folder (skintexture from skin folder and hairtexture from hair folder etc., but only those that fit the uv map layout (ponyhair texture to pony hair mesh etc.)

Thanks a lot! I used young_lightskinned_female_diffuse3.png as diffuse, and it looks better. Although the result is far from what OP demonstrated. From the node editor and text description i can see that specular and normal texture is required too. Does anyone know if there is any of them available somewhere?
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby Mindfront » Sun Sep 15, 2019 1:47 am

It has been a while...missed you all :D

First I want to post this wedding photo of Evi & Kamden.
Mindfront_-_Evi_and_Kamden_03-Wedding.jpg
Evi and Kamden wedding


This spring I begun making some ancient greece clothes by using Blender 2.79 (this was before v2.8) cloth simulator and wrapp a rectangular mesh around the dummy.
Chiton_Doric_01_female_preview_front.jpg
Doric Chiton female preview
Chiton_Doric_01_female_preview_back.jpg
Doric Chiton female preview

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/cloth ... emale.html


Chiton_Doric_01_male_preview_front.jpg
Doric Chiton male preview
Chiton_Doric_01_male_preview_back.jpg
Doric Chiton male preview

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/cloth ... _male.html

This will be the last set of clothes made in 2.79 - as now, after tested Blender 2.8 updated cloth simulator which is much, much better, and faster (although stil need to work in x10 scale) I'm excited to try it on next version clothes. Then, I found something totally awesome (at this moment free) addon https://www.blendernation.com/2019/09/0 ... lender-2-8 Although under development and some bugs its already useful and worth all attention possible.

It seems the need to manual painting folds is reduced with Blender 2.8 (and the "add-on-modeling-cloth") but I guess it will be necessary sometimes. The best and fastest technique I found was to paint black and white lines of different thickness on a middle gray texture, and then use the smear brush. Realtime preview by using the texture as bump when painting. Faster workflow as no need to sculpt or use a high resolution mesh. Now and then preview using displacement.
Painting_Folds.jpg


As my characters evolved it was time to create more mesh eyebrows and eyelashes for variety. I like that the same mesh eyebrows can look almost completly different on different characters, giving even more variety. It was hard to get them looking "realistic" with as little faces as possible and it ended up in compromising. Each hair is non-manifold triangular and goes about 1 mm into the head to avoid visible gaps when posing.
I gave Jennifer new eyebrows (number 9) and my male characters now also have mesh eyebrows.
Jennifer_new_eyebrows.jpg
Jennifer new eyebrows

All eyebrows and eyelashes can be found in Assets bodyparts http://www.makehumancommunity.org/bodyparts.html

rwman wrote:Although the result is far from what OP demonstrated. From the node editor and text description i can see that specular and normal texture is required too. Does anyone know if there is any of them available somewhere?

Hello rwman, you can try my Kamden skin http://www.makehumancommunity.org/skin/kamden_skin.html which also includes a specular and normal map.
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Re: Body study as seen from my perspective

Postby punkduck » Sun Sep 15, 2019 7:16 pm

Hi

Welcome back after such a long time. Well I wish Evi and Camden will be happy in virtual world. The real world often is more complicated. Funny that they married in a church. I also thought Evi left church because she could not understand, that religion is often used as a political weapon. Well hopefully not in Sweden, Evi is from south-east Europe ... :)

The method with manual painting I used since a long time. Mostly I had colorful clothes in weird light situations. So I started this when you presented your howto on maps and described that white means high and black low. Only the fabric pattern is added the "normal" way, I converted it to a black and white image with high contrast using GIMP only and merge both normal-maps.

Hmm, 1.5 mb .obj-file for the eyebrows :) Even my new proxy has only 14700 vertices. Definitely not be used for background characters then :)
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