Rendering in MPFB2 on Blender 4.2

[Ricardo2020]

I have been learning how to use the MakeHuman plugin for Blender, better known as MPFB, currently in version 2 beta. I am using Blender 4.2 LTS running on Linux Mint Cinnamon Virginia. This is loaded on my main workstation named Spanky.

The system is flawless, but I am eventually going to need a much more powerful machine once I start cranking up the settings. Right now, I am going in slow at 1920x1080 on the rendered images, but I plan on doing much larger pictures once the humans I create are placed in scenes. For now, they are imaged against a plain gray featureless background. One of these files is seen below:

female_003 Blender Render using EEVEE

The model in the image is known as female_003, a young Caucasian big beautiful woman with very long hair and a lovely round face. She was rendered using the Blender EEVEE rendering engine. This is the most basic of the kit inside Blender and my box can run it while grunting a bit, using around 5GB of RAM with the nVidia at high performance mode.

One light was placed so that it illuminated her from a distance with the barn door open wide. She struck a nice fashion pose so she could show off the flapper dress which perfectly flattered those wonderful curves. She kept a straight face as the camera dollied in. (I cannot model expressions yet within the plugin.) Render time was around 90 seconds.

One of the things I really like about this setup is the way MPFB fits a wide selection of clothes to the model. Since I have a reasonable amount of machine resources, I have enabled the auto fit feature in the Library Settings. Most of the boxes which enable realism are also checked.

female_003 wearing a red Maria Top

There are no poke through issues with clothing, which was a pleasant and totally unexpected surprise given all the hassle I had putting garments on big girls modeled in MakeHuman Community. But then, it is not fair to compare the two environments since we all know how powerful Blender is.

MakeHuman can run very well on modest gear, wherein Blender will gobble up your entire machine, no matter how powerful it is. So, for those hesitant nerds looking for a reason to upgrade those boxen, now is the time if you wanna blend like the pros. (I have actually went out and watched the seasoned producers on Youtube doing their Blender magic. It is both scary and exciting to be in the camp where they are, even with my humble elder c.2014 Xeon 'station. It is enough for the kind of work I want to do as a beginner.)

Another thing I am really impressed with is how the mesh behaves when working the sliders while building a model from scratch, as the one above was done. The wattle jawl, one of my most wrestled with areas when attempting realistic BBW and SSBBW results, can now be done very nicely with one slider, the Double Neck tool on the Neck menu under Modelling. I used to need many sliders. mostly custom ones made by Elvaerwyn, who was able to get those worked into the mesh operators inside MPFB.

female_003 wearing Medieval dress

The sliders are far more effective and much more realistic. The weights are handled more accurately within the plugin. (Now, you must understand that the plugin leverages the vast and mighty compute power of Blender, which can scale up as your hardware grows stronger.)

MPFB provides an easy to use shell so one does not have to spend forever to get things up and going. Along the way, it exposes Blender in such a way that makes the user want to know and do more. With Blender, the sky is the limit, heck, even beyond.)

How big is your imagination when mousing around on your 'station?

Working with female_003 inside MPFB/Blender

[Ricardo2020]

I am really enjoying the results I am getting with the MPFB2/Blender4.2 setup.

Although I am a crude beginner with this software, the images I get with the EEVEE engine are stunning, as seen in the close up below where we dollied the camera almost up to her nose just inches from her face.

Close up shot of female_003 in EEVEE

Details are incredible even using the lesser of the rendering engines in Blender. The eyebrow detail and the light on each hair is amazing. The skin, using procedural generation, is very real, right down to the pores. You can also see the mild sheen since the lady is sweating a little. (The studio lights can get warm indeed, and the evening gown she is wearing for this shoot is rather heavy.)

Let's dolly back the camera some to give you a wider look at that gorgeous face which this beautiful young woman is blessed with.

Dollying back the shutterbox on female_003

Let's dolly back some more to see her shoulders.

Head and shoulder shot of female_003

Now let's dolly back even further so we can get a gander at that lovely evening gown she wears so well.

female_003 full body shot

So, there you have it. A realistic BBW model completely generated in MPFB and rendered in EEVEE on Blender. The setup works well save for the limited detail in the hair. I am thinking that the hair will need reworked to increase the subdivisions in the mesh and add detail to the texture such as roughness and ambience. Then, the rendering engine will need to be switched into a higher gear, known as Cycles, to arrive at true photographic realism.

I am not there yet for two reasons.

One: model operations.

I am not working with the model in a scene and there is not yet a need to Cycle render since the process takes much longer, and I do not yet need that much detail.

Two: horsepower.

My current machine is equipped with 32GB of system RAM and 4GB of video RAM. Although the system has plenty of memory, that poor old GTX 970 struggles. This will need to be replaced with something like a GTX 1080 with 8GB. Not only is this GPU a generation newer, the VRAM is bigger and it clocks faster. My 860watt Seasonic PSU can power the newer card quite easily and the added VRAM will eliminate some bottlenecking of the trusty E1246v3 Xeon CPU.

Until the hardware refit happens, we shall continue to use the EEVEE motor while learning more about modelling and scene building.

Lots o' fun, yessiree.

[Ricardo2020]

Welp, just for snits and giggles, I decided to try a Cycles render on female_003 wearing a tied up bikini.

Cycles render of female_003 in bikini

Some things I learned:

Cycles is much slower. What takes EEVEE around ninety seconds to render takes Cycles about five and a half minutes.

Cycles has much higher detail in things which have it baked in, and it exposes the ones needing a good rework and new bake. Light and shadows are practically true to life. This is very impressive, expecially since we are using a superb plugin inside Blender to tell it what to do.

When in Cycles with true shading turned on in the viewport, things get very sluggish if you dolly around and can be rather pixelated at times when you stop moving/zooming/etc., as the computer catches up to Blender. Things eventually smooth out if you be still with the viewport dolly.

When doing a render, the machine ramps up the fans, turns on high performance, and chugs along as it powers through that huge math problem that got just got tossed its way.

I can see a real need for Cycles as my finishing tool, but the drafting will want to stick with EEVEE.

Ah, for the day when I can draft in Cycles. Oh, and I want some long hair that looks as good as that lovely woman's skin under that tied up bikini.