makehumancommunity.org

Surprise, I want to make ponies.

Is there a means by which one can have separate 'stock' models, with rigging and such? It'd probably be one of the most flexible things to add, if it's not already in. You could have animals, fictional stuff, even things like modular housing could be designed by snapping together the ingredients. Sub categories and "bolts" (tag points, or tag surfaces) could be used if they're not in, that way one can keep things arranged, and have the ability to extend the model by repeatedly hooking up things from joint to joint (more effective for houses for rooms/layers or fictional creatures with multiple segments). With joints and some collision detection, one could have quite a bit of fun with it, by say stuff like off-center headgear, people with multiple arms, a 6-legged alien with a hominid thorax.

The purpose of MH is not creating scenes, complex scenes should be assembled in tools like Blender.

We want to focus on one thing and do that very well, which is creating humanoid characters. While it should be possible to modify those into more fantasy-like creatures, MakeHuman will never produce eight legged aliens or animals.

I don't understand how a library file made of base models/armatures/texture nodes/joints, etc, is any different whether it's a human or not. It seems like to force only humanoid rendering/modeling tools would break a hell of a lot of things compared to using a portable format or would only let human models, which would inevitably make this program bound for the refuse bin when another tool, even based on this one, is used more flexibly. A building is not a scene either, that makes no sense how you see that a building is more complicated than a human.

pingpong2012 wrote:I don't understand how a library file made of base models/armatures/texture nodes/joints, etc, is any different whether it's a human or not. It seems like to force only humanoid rendering/modeling tools would break a hell of a lot of things compared to using a portable format or would only let human models, which would inevitably make this program bound for the refuse bin when another tool, even based on this one, is used more flexibly. A building is not a scene either, that makes no sense how you see that a building is more complicated than a human.

It sounds like you would prefer using DAZ Free Studio, rather than Makehuman. The Makehuman mandate is quite a bit different, because its intended user base is *very* different. Most of the work has been focussed on a universal human body to be used by the medical community. For instance, I made my dentist green with envy when I explained how MH has so many different built-in denture types, which ultimately can be fitted to denture-creation software (His software and hardware denture system cost $100K Canadian). That's just for starters.

Another important use is for a template that can be matched to a full body scan, to create a unique body mesh for a patient undergoing fMRI procedures. An fMRI specialist posted here several times, explaining the problem of 'twitching' when in the fMRI machine. Because MH is open-source, it can be a plugin to the body-scanning software currently in use. Why? Because the body-scanning software is a point-cloud data system that creates a finely-detailed human mesh out of impossible-to-rig triangles.

Those are just a few examples; there are many more in other applied sciences.

brkurt wrote:Most of the work has been focussed on a universal human body to be used by the medical community.

That MH is specifically designed for only for the medical community is not true. But it is one of the possible use cases.

MakeHuman has been created expressly for modeling humans, the whole user interface, camera system, and all features are tailored to having only one human centered in the screen. If you start adding things like buildings to your scene, you can start redesigning a big part of the software from scratch.

As I said, MakeHuman has been created for one (important) use case, and one only. Its purpose is to do this one thing very very well, instead of being mediocre at a lot of things. We will not get distracted or get side-tracked by other fantasies. But you can expect that MakeHuman will always do exactly what its name says, and do that very well.

For all the extras, I suggest you take a look at Blender, an amazing piece of open source software that does everything you want and more, and that integrates very well with MakeHuman.