Assets not rendered

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Assets not rendered

Postby mojoe3987 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 10:17 am

Dear community,

I am currently learning MH and blender to create characters for research projects. So far, everything went well with tutorials etc. However, now I am facing an issue that I could not solve myself: When I render my character in blender, I do only see the main "human parts" in the render, but other assets (e.g., eyebrows, hair, clothes) are not rendered. Can you tell me why that happens?

Thanks a lot for your support - I really appreciate it!

2022-03-16 11_08_15.png


2022-03-16 11_08_49-Blender Render.png
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby Ricardo2020 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:08 pm

Greetings and salutations, Mojoe.

I get the same results when a certain set of conditions exist. I shall elaborate below...

I am running Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.4 on a custom built Intel Xeon Haswell system equipped with an NVidia GTX960. It has plenty of everything, SSD, 32GB DDR3, etc. The core parts were made by Gigabyte, as is the GPU. The Seasonic PSU delivers 850 watts. There are several big poop brown and vomit tan colored Noctua fans cooling things off. The machine is overkill for MakeHuman or Blender. It is more than up to the task, akin to killing a tiny fly with a large fusion bomb.

So... I run MakeHuman and dial in a toon to my liking. As is well so far. Then I change the view from orthographic to perspective with a custom plugin. All is still well. Then I decide to change some clothing to better suit the toon. Suddenly, the textures all go transparent except for hair and skin. Not good. I go into the materials and reassign the transparent stuff so that it returns to normal, since MakeHuman has lost the settings for these textures as if I had unassigned them (they have lost the yellow highlights in the right hand pane.)

After resetting things, I go to render the toon. I get the result you have given in the example above. The workaround is to save the model, close MakeHuman, relaunch it, and try to load and render the toon again. If I do not step on the "skeleton" or "hide faces under clothes" widgets, I can render the toon successfully. If not, the same thing happens again and I must rinse and repeat the steps mentioned above.

What I have learned so far is that certain clothing or materials will cause MakeHuman to forget where they are or how to display them, so it falls back to a transparent texture for things that have "gone south". I do not know why this happens. I believe that when we do figure this out, both you and I will have a solution to a common problem that is hiding somewhere on ye aulde python's back or perhaps underneath its snaky belly scales...

This is a job for the developer team, me thinks, since the issue has existed all the way back to version 1.0...
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby joepal » Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:18 pm

How did you import the character into blender? MPFB1, MPFB2, MHX?
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby mojoe3987 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:32 pm

joepal wrote:How did you import the character into blender? MPFB1, MPFB2, MHX?


Thanks a lot for coming back to me!

I used the function "Import MHM" in the MPFB v2.0-a1.

I added a screenshot including the hierarchy in case I did anything wrong there.

Screenshot.png
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby mojoe3987 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 3:37 pm

Ricardo2020 wrote:Greetings and salutations, Mojoe.

I get the same results when a certain set of conditions exist. I shall elaborate below...

I am running Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.4 on a custom built Intel Xeon Haswell system equipped with an NVidia GTX960. It has plenty of everything, SSD, 32GB DDR3, etc. The core parts were made by Gigabyte, as is the GPU. The Seasonic PSU delivers 850 watts. There are several big poop brown and vomit tan colored Noctua fans cooling things off. The machine is overkill for MakeHuman or Blender. It is more than up to the task, akin to killing a tiny fly with a large fusion bomb.

So... I run MakeHuman and dial in a toon to my liking. As is well so far. Then I change the view from orthographic to perspective with a custom plugin. All is still well. Then I decide to change some clothing to better suit the toon. Suddenly, the textures all go transparent except for hair and skin. Not good. I go into the materials and reassign the transparent stuff so that it returns to normal, since MakeHuman has lost the settings for these textures as if I had unassigned them (they have lost the yellow highlights in the right hand pane.)

After resetting things, I go to render the toon. I get the result you have given in the example above. The workaround is to save the model, close MakeHuman, relaunch it, and try to load and render the toon again. If I do not step on the "skeleton" or "hide faces under clothes" widgets, I can render the toon successfully. If not, the same thing happens again and I must rinse and repeat the steps mentioned above.

What I have learned so far is that certain clothing or materials will cause MakeHuman to forget where they are or how to display them, so it falls back to a transparent texture for things that have "gone south". I do not know why this happens. I believe that when we do figure this out, both you and I will have a solution to a common problem that is hiding somewhere on ye aulde python's back or perhaps underneath its snaky belly scales...

This is a job for the developer team, me thinks, since the issue has existed all the way back to version 1.0...



Thanks a lot Ricardo for this thorough explanation. If I understand correctly, you have this issue in the makehuman application? I experienced this rendering issue in blender. Relaunching the program did not help so far :roll:
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby Ricardo2020 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 6:18 pm

Greetings, Mojoe.

I was in MakeHuman when I observed this behavior. I cannot figure out what causes this, but I am suspecting that the NVidia driver and the rendering motor in MakeHuman are tossing spitballs at eachother. I do know that the issue is specific to certain assets and is not a problem most of the time.

As for Blender, I have yet to really get soil on my boots in there, since I am a total noob on that. I am just now getting my arms around MakeHuman and I do know how to install and troubleshoot various plugins for it. My instance of the program is very customized and still in trial...

Always glad to be of service...
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby mojoe3987 » Wed Mar 16, 2022 9:44 pm

Ricardo2020 wrote:Greetings, Mojoe.

I was in MakeHuman when I observed this behavior. I cannot figure out what causes this, but I am suspecting that the NVidia driver and the rendering motor in MakeHuman are tossing spitballs at eachother. I do know that the issue is specific to certain assets and is not a problem most of the time.

As for Blender, I have yet to really get soil on my boots in there, since I am a total noob on that. I am just now getting my arms around MakeHuman and I do know how to install and troubleshoot various plugins for it. My instance of the program is very customized and still in trial...

Always glad to be of service...


After trying randomly stuff for a couple of hours I found the solution: I needed to change the "render engine". Instead of "Eevee" I used "Cycles" and it worked. Maybe this info safes you some time in the future as well. Thanks for your support!
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby loki1950 » Thu Mar 17, 2022 3:12 am

Yeah our support for EEVEE is still spotty though a blender API shift in the 3.0 series it is better as blender sets up an Eevee output at the shader level now which was not the case with the 2.9 series.

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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby joepal » Thu Mar 17, 2022 9:33 am

mojoe3987 wrote:After trying randomly stuff for a couple of hours I found the solution: I needed to change the "render engine". Instead of "Eevee" I used "Cycles" and it worked. Maybe this info safes you some time in the future as well. Thanks for your support!


It should work with eevee too.

Can you paste the contents of the MHM file here? It should be possible to open with any text editor.
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Re: Assets not rendered

Postby Worker11811 » Sun Mar 27, 2022 1:27 am

@mojoe3987;

On your second example image where the character's body is invisible but the head, hands and feet are okay...

When you import a MakeHuman into Blender with clothing, the importer sometimes adds an invisibility mask. This is done because, if part of the character's body will be covered with clothing, etc., those parts are not needed. Sometimes, parts of the character's body will appear to poke through the clothes or otherwise interfere. It also complicates rendering and takes more time when extraneous things "clog up" the render process. An invisibility mask simplifies things.

If you don't need a mask, you can delete it or, if you want to temporarily turn it off, this can be done in the Modifers panel.

Example-Mask-Picture.png


In "Example 1" we have a character wearing swimming trunks.
Everything is as it should be. The trunks are visible. The underlying structure of the character's body is invisible.

In "Example 2" we have hidden the character's trunks but have forgotten to disable or remove the mask.
Part of the character's body is invisible, even though we don't want it to be.

In "Example 3" we have temporarily disabled the mask.
The previously invisible part of the character is visible again.
I didn't delete the mask. I just disabled it. (Turned it off.) I might want to put trunks back on my character again so I want to keep the mask modifier and simply turn it off.

All this is done in the Modifier panel.

Example-Mask-Panel.png


The circled elements are your control buttons.
The "camera" button enables/disables a modifier for rendering ONLY. Its effect will still be visible during editing.
The "eye" button enables/disables a modifier for editing ONLY. Its effect will still be visible during rendering.
If you want a modifier to be enabled/disabled for everything, you must use BOTH buttons.

If you want that modifier to go away, completely, never to be used again, just hit the "X" and delete that line in your modifiers list.

Now... If you see that those buttons have been shaded in violet, that means that they are under control of a driver.
You might be able to temporarily change them but, when your program updates itself as you change view or begin a render, they will snap back to their original settings. I mention this because things might get confusing if you don't realize what's going on.

Drivers might be automatically placed on your invisibility modifiers or other things when you activate "Visibility" in the MakeHuman tool tab. It's very convenient if you want to be able to quickly show or hide items on your model but can get confusing if you don't realize what Blender is doing, behind the scenes.

If you are experimenting with Visibility but decide to do away with it, the drivers that were applied might still be left behind, causing even more confusion. If that happens, go back to your Modifier panel, find the item you want to fix then RIGHT CLICK on a violet-shaded button. Select "Remove Driver" from the context menu that pops up.

This will remove your driver permanently. If you want to have it back, you'll need to reactivate Visibility again. The MakeHuman tool will make a new driver.

Hope this helps! :)
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