In-browser version of Make Human?

[alex_farlie]

If it's not possible to support Win32 directly any-more , would it be feasible to provide a basic version of MakeHuman that can run in a modern browser (which may be running on a 32bit Windows system)?


I note that in the last year or so some fairly graphically demanding programs have been done with WASM based applets.

[joepal]

Possible yes, feasible... well, depends on how much work one is prepared to put into it.

Makehuman characters are perfectly possible to use in, for example, babylonjs. So there's nothing in principle stopping a web browser implementation.

However the work required to port the entire MH application, or portions thereof, to javascript is quite extensive.

For the frontend, you'd have to implement the entire 3d engine in WebGL or some wrapper for it. Getting everything from mesh rendering to shaders in place is something which is pretty advanced.

For backend I don't think anything particularly complicated would be needed. But you'd still want a backend in order to save models etc.

But it's not a particularly odd idea. If we had started from scratch with MH today, chances is we would have looked at web first.

[alex_farlie]

For the frontend, you'd have to implement the entire 3d engine in WebGL or some wrapper for it. Getting everything from mesh rendering to shaders in place is something which is pretty advanced.

For backend I don't think anything particularly complicated would be needed. But you'd still want a backend in order to save models etc.

But it's not a particularly odd idea. If we had started from scratch with MH today, chances is we would have looked at web first.

My thinking was WASM rather than Javscript as such, but wasn't sure if Python->WASM was possible.

[joepal]

I doubt you'd gain anything by trying to re-use the python codebase. It would be quicker and less error-prone to try to understand the algorithms and only re-use the assets and configuration files.

One avenue which has been partially explored earlier is to open a web server in a makehuman plugin and do things that way. In this case, all operations such as adding a target, would be done with MH as a backend. The only 3d logic that would be present in the frontend would be presenting the end result. Alternatively, the only thing that would be shown in the frontend is a rendered image of the latest state of the makehuman window.

While this is feasible on a one-user-at-a-time basis, it would not work in a multiuser setting.