Losing the head for a better performance

[cousteau]

The face has too many details that could slow down GPU performance (teeth, eyes, nose, lips, ears...). Also, it's something too complex to be modeled together with all the body. I think it's a good idea to cut the head off.
Here are some possibilities:
* Headless. The body ends on the neck.
* Faceless. The head consists on a few polygons, just to figure out how the resulting model would look like.
* Wilson. The face has been previously rendered and is "painted" as a 2D texture on the faceless head.
* Normal. The head isn't cheated; it's rendered as is.
A dialog would allow to select which rendering mode of the above is preferred. Also an option to toggle the hair preview would be nice.

MakeHuman should have a separate "Head" tab on the Modeling mode where only the head is rendered. This tab would have most ethnicity tools, expression tools, hair tools, etc. After leaving the Head tab, the UV texture for the "Wilson" mode is updated.

Finally, before rendering (with Aqsis), the body model and the head model would be merged into a single one.

[Manuel]

The bottleneck are teeth.
We should find a way to hide them...

Thanks,

Manuel

[brkurt]

Thanks Manuel...

I posted this two years ago, when I first started working with Makehuman. It's not just the teeth, it's the mouth cavity also.
Removing it manually is both time-consuming, and usually destructive to the mesh (the corners of the mouth usually get deleted. ) If you look at my latest contribution to the Gallery, you'll see the mouth cavity and teeth still intact. Once removed, the entire .blend file is only 1.3 M, and easily manipulated on one my ancient Pentium III render farm boxes.

On the good side: the teeth and mouth cavity could have different levels of resolution. I usually make teeth and tongue myself, and a single subsurf is usually enough to make them work for lip-sync.

[Manuel]

In one of beta releases we will add some export options, to exclude some unwanted groups. It's not hard to code. On the contrary, exclude the geometry from target calculation require a bit of work, we need to think about it.

Best,

Manuel