Command Line Interface

[jdavidbakr]

I have just discovered MakeHuman and really am impressed with this project. My use case would be a situation where my goal is to generate random "profile images" of faces - really thousands ultimately - and have been digging through the docs trying to find if there is anything about some sort of command line interface that I can use on a headless server and a cron job. I'd love to be able to just go through every parameter and apply a random value to each and spit out a jpeg image. I have found some references on the forums that seem to imply that it exists, but can't actually find any information confirming or denying the existence of such an interface. Is there such a feature and if so could someone point me in the direction of the documentation for it?

Much appreciated!

[joepal]

There have been a few attempts made from third parts, but nothing that survived for any period of time.

There are largely two things making the feature cumbersome:

First, MH has always been a GUI application which was never intended to be used as a server component. While it's probably possible to make an efficient CLI based on the code, it never was a design goal that any of the devs were interested in.

Second, due to the AGPL license, any aggregate which uses MakeHuman as an integral part in such a setup would need to be licensed AGPL too (that's the function of the "A" in "AGPL"). For some reason this ultimately always discouraged people.

This said, the most promising approach I saw (but which I don't know if it's available anymore), didn't even try to turn MH into a CLI application. Instead it patched MH to open up a server socket which could then in its turn be called from a separate CLI or server-side utility. This way, the MH application was left largely unmodified.

[duststorm]

There is an official MH project for commandline interface, as a fork hosted on my bitbucket account
http://bugtracker.makehuman.org/projects/commandline

It's not been maintained though, and I believe it even did not survive the latest merge with development branch (it should be a quick fix but I haven't put in the time yet, being too busy with the main MakeHuman, other projects, and life in general). If someone wants to revive it, I accept pull requests!
I think this branch is the best attempt as of yet to achieve a commandline interface for MH (better than the socket approach, and free of AGPL constraints).

The plan is that, in time, if this fork stabilizes it can be merged into the main MakeHuman application. But until that time it's an experimental feature, separated from the main release cycle.

If you want details on how we interpret MakeHuman's AGPL license: viewtopic.php?p=23649#p23649

[jdavidbakr]

Thanks so much for your replies - that makes me feel better knowing that it's not part of the official package and I wasn't just missing it. I may look at that fork and see if I have time to play around with it!

[Rhynedahll]

I've recently become curious about whether MH could be used as a command line application.

My usage would involve feeding MH a file of measurement parameters and having it generate and export a finished model in .fbx or other standard format. The exported models (under CC0) would then be imported into another program.

How is the command line branch used? Is there documentation?

What input parameter format does the fork use?

[joepal]

I don't think anyone has touched that fork since this thread was last active. And to my knowledge, there isn't much documentation for what exist.

At this point, I've started with another approach for working with MH from command line. If you take a look under "cli/mhrc" here https://github.com/makehumancommunity/community-plugins, you can find some early attempts. Currently it works to list modifiers and apply a modifier from command line (there is a script for each).

It's not exactly the same, but maybe it could eventually become useful.

[Rhynedahll]

I don't think anyone has touched that fork since this thread was last active. And to my knowledge, there isn't much documentation for what exist.

At this point, I've started with another approach for working with MH from command line. If you take a look under "cli/mhrc" here https://github.com/makehumancommunity/community-plugins, you can find some early attempts. Currently it works to list modifiers and apply a modifier from command line (there is a script for each).

It's not exactly the same, but maybe it could eventually become useful.

Thanks! I'll look in on that.

[wiwski]

Hi there,

I know this thread is a bit old, sorry to dig it up, but I'd like to know if there were any update concerning this project ?

Thanks !

[joepal]

No, I haven't touched the CLI plugin stuff since last post. And to my knowledge, no-one is working on the command line fork.

[lexi]

Hello, sorry for bringing this up.

What's the current status?
I tried playing with this make human comand line repo - https://github.com/severin-lemaignan/ma ... ommandline
I managed to load .mhm files, but failed at exporting them.