Making Poses

[Ricardo2020]

One of the things I have always wanted to do ever since I joined the Community is make poses.

As all know by now, MakeHuman cannot build poses. It can load them but there are no means within the program for making them. One must use Blender for that. One also needs the MPFB2 plugin installed in Blender. It will appear on the tool shelf when you press the letter "n".

I have developed a workflow that uses four programs, MH, Blender, the GIMP and Image Viewer.

I make the model in MHv1.3.0 and save it as a standard model with no assets. The model is built by first getting all the sliders where I want them, saving the result as a single target, then refreshing the base, adding the saved custom target, and then saving the resulting model.

I them load the model in the MPFB plugin inside Blender. Once loaded, I go into pose mode and move the bones until I arrive at the desired pose. This is not easy. It is very tedious but after a while, one gets used to the way those circle tools work.

When all the bones are where I want them, I export the file as a single frame BVH. Now I can copy the saved BVH file into the MH pose folder. I assign it to the model in MakeHuman and do a render. I open the render in the GIMP, crop it to content, scale it to a height of 512 pixels and export it as a PNG with the same name as the BVH. I rename the saved image by changing the DOS extenson from PNG to thumb. I put the thumb file in the MH pose folder.

Now I can see the image in the MakeHuman pose selection column. I am making progress. I need to figure out how to get that same funvtionality going inside the library within the Blender/MPFB setup...

I use the Image Viewer ro look at a folder full of renders so I can easily flip through them to see what various poses will look like one after the other. This is useful for doing quick animation testing frame by frame.

[joepal]

There are two parallell pose systems in MPFB.

The BVH-based one is the same as what you use in MakeHuman. You can open the same bvh files directly in MPFB. If you select the rig and then open the rigging -> load pose panel, you will find an "Import MH BVH" button. If you have a lot of BVH poses, you can put them in the library and have them show up under apply assets -> poses. You can download and install for example https://static.makehumancommunity.org/a ... ses02.html in order to get an initial structure in your data dir to which you can copy additional existing bvh files.

The other pose system is JSON-based. You can create these poses under "create assets" -> "MakePose". Here you can create poses for any rig, not just the default one. Further you can create partial poses, for example a facial expression which can be combined with another pose. If you create poses here, they will automatically end up on the drop down menus under "rigging" -> "load pose"

The upside of the json-based flow is that you can use the default rig with rig helpers, or even rigify, which are a lot easier to pose since they have IK support. But these poses are then only usable within MPFB and not compatible with MakeHuman.

But if you already have a lot of BVH poses, maybe the easiest way is to stick with those.

[tomcat]

The other pose system is JSON-based.

Is this system only suitable for static poses or can it be used for animation?

[joepal]

There is a very crappy attempt at supporting animation for the JSON-based system. But I never finished it, so wouldn't recommend it for anything other than experiments or helping out with the development. It's possible I even removed the UI panels for it, since it never worked properly.

[Ricardo2020]

I am posting this to talk about the changes to my workflow since having spent some time learning how to use MPFB inside Blender.

There are now only two programs in use on my 'station during render farming most of the time, and these are Blender and Image Viewer. I can now do all my human making work within MPFB with the exeption of expression mixing. One day, there will be FACS inside MPFB and the Viseme to speech stuff, perhaps as a software socket of sorts. But I ramble...

I create a complete, but nude, model from scratch and save it as a blend file. I pose the bones. I make the pose as a JSON file. I also export the file as a BVH. This way, it is ueable in both MPFB and MakeHuman. The two file formats need to be used within the programs that load them, and they cannot be intermingled between the two. The only way to keep the files in sync when changes are made is to save both formats in Blender.

These days, I use Blender as a model creation tool and MakeHuman as a model proofing and testing tool. I do this with the hope that, after I get reasonably adept at this stuff, one of my models will be good enough to share with the Community. So far, I have made six models, with the sixth one being the most complete and polished. She is not perfect, but she is relatively close to what a production level asset would be, usable for MakeHuman as well as Blender.

MakeHuman is very comfortable if you are a beginner. Blender can be intimidating. However, learning one gets you to learn the other, and at the end of the day, they both work the same way in many areas.

Now to get a machine fast enough to chew quickly through Cycles rendering times...

[Ricardo2020]

MakeHuman Community has a huge collection of pose files which run a complete gamut of actions. One of our long time and well established members who calls herself "Flute" has used this huge library to create her comic book entries in the gallery on this forum. She does exceptional art worthy of a gander, indeed.

I too have played around with these assets, having all of them in my files. However, I noticed something right away when I tried to use these poses with my full figured ladies. Things collided and poked in ways that were a deal breaker. I can fix small issues post edit, but these problems were not fixable by those means. What to do?

It would appear that a pose must be constructed around the body being posed. A pose made on a thin frame will not work on a thick one. The fat gets in the way and renders the pose useless. Thus, there are two workarounds, both involving MPFB and Blender since these cannot be addressed within MakeHuman.

The first workaround is to take an existing pose and load it onto your model in Blender by importing the BVH. Now, move the bones around in pose mode to get at the desired result. Then export the pose as a BVH, giving it a new name. Repeat this for all the poses you want to use with said model. Save them all with the model in the same folder where the model lives. To use these in MakeHuman, copy them to the poses folder in MakeHuman data.

The second workaround is not a workaround at all, but rather, a way to get Blender stuff into MakeHuman. Build your model and pose from scratch and export the pose as a BVH, keeping poses and model in the same folder as before. Save the model as a blend. Then copy the BVH files to MakeHuman's poses folder.

If your model was built in MakeHuman and then opened in Blender, the BVH files will work perfectly in MakeHuman, but only with the model they were made from. Thus, both proggies need to be running, with Blender blending and MakeHuman testing. You also need a graphics viewer open to rifle through the results as a slide show so you can make instant comparisons as you go along.

Later in this thread, I plan to show graphically how this works and applies to differing body types.