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Hello everyone.

The free software of Blender and MakeHuman is amazing and daunting at the same time. I am mainly a music producer, but I also love visual art and am attempting to make a video with animation. Ultimately my goal is to create a character model that will be utilized in FLStudio's ZGame Editor Visualizer 2 Plugin. Quite a task really, but one member of the community for that plugin has done an excellent job of creating a preset that can utilize single mesh 3d models (fbx) and their animations which can be synced to various parameters (e.g., volume input controls the speed of the animation). Once I have a model I will be modifying that preset (which I've already gotten the okay to do) to two different models. So that is the ultimate goal. However, I wanted to be able to share the assets I created to contribute to the MakeHuman community in the process of doing this. I know that Blender is where I will need to create the single mesh model that I need to export to the ZGE Visualizer Program and trying to get the hair to work in MakeHuman isn't a necessity - but I do think MakeHuman is pretty awesome and I love having all the different assets to play around with creation.

With that intro out of the way This is my first attempt to make custom hair in the Blender Add On MakeClothes into Make Human. I followed JWork's Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-EnqE4ZrRY that explains how to make a dress and used the same process but instead of duplicating the Skirt and Tights materials to create clothes, I duplicated the hair material to create the custom hair and then edited the duplicated hair mesh doing everything else the same (deleting materials on base mesh, creating model, deleting vertices and creating vertices with the same process as in the video). The only process I didn't follow was creating seams which I'm not sure how you would do with the hair mesh. The Blender file and Makehuman Assets are attached.

Things look fine in Blender but when I open the files in Makehuman I get what can only be described as a skullet with weird forehead hair. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Without having looked at it, my guess is you used automatic vertex groups, which will probably produce weird results in this case. Instead, you should assign a group "hair" to the hair helper on the base mesh, and a group "hair" to all vertices on your hair mesh. This way, the hair will be fitted to the hair helpers rather than to the skull.

Seams are only necessary when a mesh cannot otherwise be flattened automatically in the UV unwrap step. For example, UV-unwrapping a cube would require that you say that a few of the edges can be split so that the mesh can be flattened onto an UV surface.

Thanks for the reply and the suggestion - it worked. Below is what I did in a little more detail in case anyone else comes across the issue.

joepal wrote:Without having looked at it, my guess is you used automatic vertex groups, which will probably produce weird results in this case.

Yes. I used the "create vertex groups" on the hair mesh that produced "Mid", "Left" and "Right" groups.

joepal wrote: Instead, you should assign a group "hair" to the hair helper on the base mesh, and a group "hair" to all vertices on your hair mesh. This way, the hair will be fitted to the hair helpers rather than to the skull.

I deleted the "Mid", "Left" and "Right" vertex groups in the Hair Mesh after creating and assigning all vertices in that mesh to the new "Hair" vertex group. I also added to the "Hair" Vertex group to the "Base" mesh (not deleting anything else) and it worked.

Now I'm dealing with weird rendering on the hair that is interesting shading that doesn't necessarily jive with the rendering style in the skins in MakeHuman - but I think that has to do with my UV mapping and I'll do some trial and error there.

Another issue that often pops up with hair is making sure that backface culling is set to "False".

Once I’ve got this down I’ll create a guide (so that I remember mostly). It’s been a good intro into both programs for me.