Make Targets with Separate Files?

If you have problems understanding something or getting started, ask here

Moderator: joepal

Make Targets with Separate Files?

Postby formerbusinessowner » Sat Mar 17, 2018 1:53 pm

I'm trying to work out a simple way to produce experimental stimuli of varying fatness, and was hoping to use MakeTarget so that one slider could control all of the variables towards one fat archetype (I'm using all the arm/leg/torso sliders etc. rather than just the macro weight slider)

I have produced a thin and fat archetype, and was hoping there would be a way to produce a target file which can use these two as the extremes. As far as I can tell, however, you can only make targets by loading in a base and editing this within blender, rather than setting one as the base and one as the target (even though all vertices/markers are in the same relative positions)

Is there a way around this?
formerbusinessowner
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2018 12:12 pm

Re: Make Targets with Separate Files?

Postby wolgade » Sun Mar 18, 2018 5:06 pm

A target is simply what Blender calls a shape key. Other software might call it morph. Targets store translation vectors for the vertices.

This technique only works with two identical meshes. Identical means same number of vertices and same vertice order. If your archetypes are not derived from the base mesh, then there's no straight way to create a target. You could try to fit the base mesh to your stuff by using the shrinkwrap modifier e.g.. You could also use any other technique for this purpose as long as you don't delete or add vertices.
wolgade
 
Posts: 795
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2013 6:50 pm

Re: Make Targets with Separate Files?

Postby jujube » Sun Mar 18, 2018 8:38 pm

I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do, but "load shape key from mesh" in blender is often useful.

Are you asking about how the dual-sided targets (not sure of the best name?) that come with makehuman are made? Look in the makehuman source code bitbucket for the actual target files that makehuman uses. Generally, each official slider is actually driven by two targets, an "increase" and "decrease" version, named in a standard way that makehuman can recognize. And the macro targets actually seem to be composed of many smaller targets? But unfortunately I don't know how to make custom targets do either of those things.
jujube
 
Posts: 404
Joined: Fri Aug 14, 2015 10:46 pm

Re: Make Targets with Separate Files?

Postby formerbusinessowner » Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:12 pm

wolgade wrote:A target is simply what Blender calls a shape key. Other software might call it morph. Targets store translation vectors for the vertices.

This technique only works with two identical meshes. Identical means same number of vertices and same vertice order. If your archetypes are not derived from the base mesh, then there's no straight way to create a target. You could try to fit the base mesh to your stuff by using the shrinkwrap modifier e.g.. You could also use any other technique for this purpose as long as you don't delete or add vertices.


The archetypes are created in MakeHuman, all I want is to save toons I've created as targets, but it's proving very difficult for some reason (I understand there's supposed to be a savetarget plugin but I can't find a way to get this to work
formerbusinessowner
 
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Mar 10, 2018 12:12 pm

Re: Make Targets with Separate Files?

Postby joepal » Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:53 pm

formerbusinessowner wrote:
wolgade wrote:A target is simply what Blender calls a shape key. Other software might call it morph. Targets store translation vectors for the vertices.

This technique only works with two identical meshes. Identical means same number of vertices and same vertice order. If your archetypes are not derived from the base mesh, then there's no straight way to create a target. You could try to fit the base mesh to your stuff by using the shrinkwrap modifier e.g.. You could also use any other technique for this purpose as long as you don't delete or add vertices.


The archetypes are created in MakeHuman, all I want is to save toons I've created as targets, but it's proving very difficult for some reason (I understand there's supposed to be a savetarget plugin but I can't find a way to get this to work


This is indeed where savetarget comes in.

Currently savetarget is only available in functional form in the development version of MakeHuman. You could try this if you want. It will peacefully co-exist with the stable release on the same machine. But don't be surprised if MH behaves somewhat erratically in development version.

There is a windows installer with the dev build here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/makehuman/nightly/ ("makehuman-community-*-win32.exe").
Joel Palmius (LinkedIn)
MakeHuman Infrastructure Manager
http://www.palmius.com/joel
joepal
 
Posts: 4465
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 11:20 am


Return to Newbies

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest