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Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:40 am
by joepal
Breaking this out from Mindfront's thread.

There are many very useful assets in the repo now. Many of these could be made more available by either a) including them in the core distribution or b) offer them as some kind of bundle. In the latter case, there should be some sort of functionality for easily installing that bundle.

Assets included in core

I have already started to toy with the idea of including a larger set of assets in the core distro, with the following limitations:

  • Only assets licensed CC0 can be included, as we promise users that all output from MH is CC0 (and don't want to change that promise)
  • The distribution cannot grow too large. Thus while high-resolution textures/maps might look beautiful, they would make the core distro grow too much.

Within these limitations, I have (when I was at it a while ago) started to consider the following for inclusion in the core distribution:

  • Extra materials for the already existing core assets, for example MargaretToigo's large set of suit materials, and hair materials
  • A large set of poses. These are very small, so has no considerable cost in including.
  • A large set of expressions, same as poses.

That was as far as I got. If you happen to have a list of assets you think should be included, please add the asset names here. It would be helpful to also get the links to the asset nodes in the repo.

Asset packs

I agree that this would be very welcome and make contributed asset a lot more accessible. We'd just have to figure out a good structure/procedure for how to offer them. It would probably be cumbersome and error-prone to offer them as zips and expect the user to extract them in the right place.

Also, in order for the packs to be accessible, there should probably be some kind of meta-data available for them, along with renders etc.

My immediate thought would be to have a separate tab in the asset downloader plugin, where one can get a list of asset packs together with a render. But I'm open for suggestions.

Re: Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 1:49 pm
by MargaretToigo
Now, let me first say that I prefer MakeHuman over Daz very much. Daz has some great clothes and hairstyles -- many of which I've converted to use in MakeHuman -- but the uncanny valley nature of the Daz people creeps me out.

That said, Daz has a separate installer utility that puts all the various parts (meshes, textures, thumbnails, etc) into the right folders. It looks to me like it's just an unzip app with a script that tells it where to extract to. It is quite handy, and I miss it when I download Daz assets from Renderosity and other places, because unless the asset has been packed with the right folder names and structure (this is not the case about half the time), I have to look for where they go and copy/paste (and sometimes rename) each folder manually. Some things are not in the right places, but once I found them and exported them, I didn't care because the Daz app is just a pass-thru for my purposes. I do care about having my MakeHuman folders well-organized.

Another thing that Daz has is separate texture packs for various assets, which only contain the textures (diff, spec, normal, etc) and if you have the clothing/hair/whatever meshes already installed, they are added to the color options. This is similar to adding new materials from the Materials section here.

I really like the asset downloader under the Community tab in MakeHuman, and I've had no problems downloading assets and materials from it except for alternative materials for assets that came bundled with MakeHuman, those won't write. The reason is that, in Windows, the built-in assets are stored in the ProgramFiles/MakeHuman folder, which has different write permissions than Documents/MakeHuman, where all the assets I've made and downloaded are stored.

Just a few thoughts. I love MakeHuman and I want to help keep it alive and evolving.

Re: Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:40 pm
by blindsaypatten
Is the functionality that allows you to choose multiple materials for eyes something general that can be used for any asset? If so, how does one set up the alternate materials to get them to appear in the materials tab when the asset is selected?

Re: Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2018 12:07 am
by Mindfront
This can lead to something very interesting. A good idea to keep the core distro of MakeHuman as CC0 to avoid confusions. Maybe time for me to try the asset downloader plugin to get me an idea of ​​how it works as I think that would be part of the organizing solution as most software nowadays use online downloaders.

Re: Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2018 8:34 am
by joepal
blindsaypatten wrote:Is the functionality that allows you to choose multiple materials for eyes something general that can be used for any asset? If so, how does one set up the alternate materials to get them to appear in the materials tab when the asset is selected?


Basically, if there's a MHMAT file in the same directory as an asset, MH will assume it is an alternative material for that asset.

Unfortunately this also means that currently alternative materials for core assets will have to be placed in the makehuman installation folder, rather than in the user's home makehuman data folder. This is on the todo list to fix in the py3 version.

Re: Asset packs / new core assets

PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2018 8:36 am
by joepal
Mindfront wrote:This can lead to something very interesting. A good idea to keep the core distro of MakeHuman as CC0 to avoid confusions. Maybe time for me to try the asset downloader plugin to get me an idea of ​​how it works as I think that would be part of the organizing solution as most software nowadays use online downloaders.


If you happen to use windows, the easiest way to get this is to download the new build from here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/makehuman/nightly/

This comes preloaded with the asset downloader. It coexists peacefully with the 1.1.1 version if you have that since earlier.