What am I doing wrong with my no ears target?

[InsaneXade]

I've just spent most of the day trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. After going over the documentation 5 times I must admit defeat and ask for help. The left shows the no ear target in Blender. The right is the same no ears applied as a custom target.

What's wrong?

I used smooth vertex and sculpting in order to achieve the result. According to the help file:

To create a custom target, the artist has to alter the base mesh, which is done in the usual way within Blender. First start edit mode, and then select one or more vertices, moving them to reshape the mesh. You may use the full power of Blender to create your morphing target design. The only rule, in order to create a valid morphing target, is to never add or delete a vertex, face or edge. The topology must be absolutely preserved. After the modelling process is completed, the MakeHuman™ morphing target can be saved by pressing the "Save Target As" button on the MakeTarget™ panel. By default this will save all of the offset deviations of every vertice from the base mesh into the target file.

The "full power of blender" statement suggests that I can sculpt, without adding anything to the mesh, so I did that. I simply sculpted the model without messing with any type of modifiers. Is that what I did wrong? I thought that perhaps all the modeling was done by sculpting on the mesh. Am I missing a step? please tell me what I did wrong so I can really help you guys make non standard characters by sharing my ideas as I complete them.

[duststorm]

On what basemesh model did you create the target?
Raw basemesh? Try doing it on eg a young male, or female, then replicate those same macro detais in MH, and see if your target works then.

Using targets for this is probably not the best solution. If it were me, I would create a custom proxy mesh.

[InsaneXade]

I am using the raw base mesh, since I plan on using it for all types of characters. I try it on the unaltered, default character. I am experienced with blender but not so much MH But I'll recreate it with the male and see what happens.

Edit: hmm maybe I loaded the model in the wrong spot, I used the make clothes loading instead of make target load mesh. Perhaps that's what I did wrong.
Edit: Nope, that' still the same.
Edit: ah! I think you were right. I set the female as base and loaded the mesh and got the same effect. Going to make it on that after I discard it and try again

Not Quite as bad

It's not that bad but I think I know the problem, sculpting mode, because I messed around out of sculpt mode to try and smooth it better before dipping into sculpt mode
Edit: Even without touching sculpt mode I it looks the same with the basic base mesh. is it something with smoothing?

Edit:If I mess around with the actual vert locations by moving them then it works flawlessly. I think you might have a smoothing issue, which is an issue in itself because smoothing is a major part of my work flow. It's an easy way to lessen angles without wasting time with moving them around until they look smooth.

Progress!

Edit: however, if I sculpt smooth it then it looks the way it should look. I can work with that. it's awkward, cause I work best in vert edit mode but it's a good way to practice I guess. However I would love to be able to use smooth vertex and simply chose how many iterations to do. That in itself is a major time saver.

[duststorm]

It has nothing to do with scultping.

I am using the raw base mesh, since I plan on using it for all types of characters.

This reasoning is incorrect. What you are doing doesn't work (well) because you misunderstand how targets work in MakeHuman. To do what you want to do: perform a detailed absolute correction to completely flatten out certain details you need very fine grained control over all macro variations of these details, to be able to negate them.

To make it work with all characters, you need to remodel it for all characters. It's as simple as that, that's the only way to make this work.
This means you have to create variations of your target for about 3*2*4* (race*gender*age) == 24 variables. That's 24 different targets to create.
You might perhaps be able to cut some corners by strategically choosing the variables to model for, with imperfect but acceptible results, but it's far from ideal.

As I said, it would be way easier to just create an alternative topology, which would in fact work perfectly for all characters. As an added bones, you can clean up the topology, simplifying and saving all the polygons that are not needed when ears are gone.

[InsaneXade]

This reasoning is incorrect. What you are doing doesn't work (well) because you misunderstand how targets work in MakeHuman. To do what you want to do: perform a detailed absolute correction to completely flatten out certain details you need very fine grained control over all macro variations of these details, to be able to negate them.

Okay, I follow you so far

To make it work with all characters, you need to remodel it for all characters. It's as simple as that, that's the only way to make this work.
This means you have to create variations of your target for about 3*2*4* (race*gender*age) == 24 variables. That's 24 different targets to create.
You might perhaps be able to cut some corners by strategically choosing the variables to model for, with imperfect but acceptible results, but it's far from ideal.

Hmm, the way I understand it I must model the ears on each base model if I want to have a universal no ears morph. I had assumed since the base mesh was the master mesh that targets made with it would allow for easy target creation. I tested my sculpting flattened ear on all the ages and genders. The only major warping was the child. I dont have time to do much else

As I said, it would be way easier to just create an alternative topology, which would in fact work perfectly for all characters. As an added bones, you can clean up the topology, simplifying and saving all the polygons that are not needed when ears are gone.

How would I make a topology? That's actually my worst weak point, making a decent model with good topology. I've spent weeks on one model that I thought looked good until I tried to rig it and the topology was so poor that it wouldn't work at all. That's what peaked my interest in make human. I've been watching it and playing with it for a year or two but never felt the need to come forward until now.

I thought I would start with something simple, like no ears then move on to the more complex idea like pointed ears for elves and the like.

Btw, did you catch all the edits I did? I dont believe in spamming a forum just because I discovered something. That's a good way to get banned.

Edit: Okay, How do I do topologies? I'm sure there's some way to do it without messing it up

[duststorm]

How would I make a topology?

Read through the makeclothes tutorials.
You can copy the basemesh in MakeHuman, modify it so the ears are gone, then fit it to the original basemesh with MakeClothes.
Slightly modify the default vertex grouping so that all basemesh vertices in the ears are excluded.
Note that, contrary to creating targets, you CAN delete/add or otherwise change vertices in the topology you're modeling.

As an extra:
Ideally all the vertices that were unchanged should be matched directly to their corresponding vertex. You can use the "Exact" vertex group for that, a feature recently introduced and currently only available in the unstable nightly.
Or when getting MH from source (hg default branch). This feature has not yet been documented but an explanation can be found here: http://bugtracker.makehuman.org/issues/37#note-6
Perhaps together with the MakeClothes documentation you can figure it out.
If this is too complex, just use the approach explained in the makeclothes documentation.

[InsaneXade]

Last try

Well, I thought I would do one last try before admitting defeat. I used the sculpting to smooth the ear out. it looks fine in Blender but not so nice in make human. guess whenever I get that far I'll just do it to each model as required. However, it makes me wonder if elf ears, which only require moving and stretching the outer ear, would be possible in makehuman. It seems to me that's the section of ear that has the square in it, which prevents an open matrix.

Upon experimenting with the ear related targets in MH I find that the basic ear shape is actually preserved and that is why it warps the no ear target. I moved the ear size slider and got this result

Big ear

So, is this a bug? Or is it just the way MH does the ear targets and I was meowing at the wrong bird to begin with?

How would I make a no ear mesh and an elf ear mesh?

[duststorm]

it makes me wonder if elf ears, which only require moving and stretching the outer ear, would be possible in makehuman.

Of course it works. As I have been trying to tell you: you're misunderstanding fundamental concepts.
If you want to create anti-targets, which is what you're trying to do, you need an 100% absolutely exact negative version of the target stack, which means you carefully need to create targets for all targets that mh applies.
This is completely different from adding targets as relative offsets (like pointy ears), which will work much better with even just one target.

So, is this a bug?

No, you're just doing it wrong, the behaviour is 100% expected.

How would I make a no ear mesh and an elf ear mesh?

Same approach as you did before with sculting would work, just use makeClothes, not makeTarget, as already explained in this thread.
For elf ears you can use targets.