Suggestion for MakeHuman developers to develop!

[qavantoo]

Hey. MakeHuman is a great software for creating characters, and MakeHuman is extremelly easy to understand. I like how MakeHuman is made. That you don't have to create anything by yourself. You simply drag the properties and change them and your character is ready. Which is a very big bonus for those who find creating their own characters too complex from scratch.
As MakeHuman is targeted towards people who want simplicity, i just had another idea. It is easy to create your own character by using MakeHuman, however it is very complex to pose your characters and animate them.

So what is my suggestion? My suggestion is to create a special section in MakeHuman or another MakeHuman software where users could create poses, scenes and animations with MakeHuman characters as easy as you can create characters with MakeHuman. Many people love simplicity and hate wasting various hours on learning how to use complex programs like Blender and others. Most of good animation/posing softwares are for cost and they cost ALOT!
I am suggesting to create another software where modelers could create scenes. You could insert many MakeHuman characters. You could move their joints, rotate them with classic Rotation and movement Axis. You could create animations by setting keyframes in simple Keyframe editor.
It wouldn't be anything complicated and it would be as easy to understand like MakeHuman character creator. I still have no idea why all the big softwares make animation process and posing process so complex.

A good example is Mine-imator. It is minecraft animation creation software, which has VERY simple UI interface. It's not complicated and it is easily to learn. Please developers of MakeHuman, take a bit of your time and take look at Mine-imator, so you have a idea what i am talking about! I am very sure that many people would love this kind of program. Here is link to Mine-imator: http://www.stuffbydavid.com/mineimator.

That program is very easy to use and has very simple interface. Unfortunately, it is only for Bloxy, minecraft-kind characters. But creating realistic, human version of this would be a good realisation! So developers of MakeHuman take some time and take look at concepts of Mine-imator. You will be surprised how easy it is to work with it. I am simply giving a suggestion, so you make human-realistic version of it! I know that many begginers and animating newbies will love it. People will get satified by their own work that they will be able to create with this software. It may even lead them deeper into animation industry and in future they may start using more proffesional tools.

Please take some time and consider my idea! Thank you .

[loki1950]

So then program an entire new 3D animation app what we have now has taken about 8 years of research and coding and why do it when there is Blender,Maya and 3dMax and several others that can handle the posing and animation already and blender is even free there are no short cuts animation is not trivial it requires work on your part period.

Enjoy the Choice

[learning]

So basically what you're saying is that MH team should go and rewrite Blender so that it would be easier to use? Not likely gonna happen. Some addon to make Blender look less intimidating could be nice though. But thinking that it'd gonna rid it of a learning curve is still fantasy.

[Mikel_J_Gee]

So, I agree to looki and learrning in whole.

Let me add some additional points of view to a topic like that:

a) Rigging, Posing and Animating are subjects in CA-Design with an highly complex background. Just rigging and animating technical objects is nothing someone can do "only from the scratch by clicking a bit around" (as far as You want to look physically correct and technically "natural". The same thing to do on biological objects is just some sort of the "next step upwards" (if You look after experience and complexity).

b) Character design is one of the highest levels of doing CGI. Only the different steps in creation (sketch, colorizing, proportions, "translating" into 3D, rigging, animating...) are mostly covered by different specialists.

So in a basic, MH covers some parts of this pipeline (also covers different abilities) - like the basic-character, the rigging and the "coloring" - or UV-design. That's a great deal and all the Know-How of those special parts flew into this software. And that's great - AND - what is more: That's absolutely enough. Nothing else and nothing more. If You look also on the fact, that You also can vest your characters, in my opinion it's more than real necessary for a system that deals with the goal in order to "generate realistic and anatomically correct meshes of the human body".

In my opinion it's also far away from being fair, to "compare" or even "expect" something "easy-going" like the mentioned "mine-craft-animator". That are two extremely different levels of animation. That's like comparing a flip-book with an 4 hours monumental cinema-scope production like "Ben Hur".

If someone want's to do the "job" for animations, She/he has to learn. At least those basics, which are essentially necessary for this stuff. There is no way around. And by the way: If any character coming out of MH, should get at least a slight visual idea of individuality, she/he also has to learn how to do this. MH is for the basics, yes. For anatomically correctness, but it's NOT an individual character. THIS has to be done otherwise. And for this (as mentioned before by others) there is a great bunch of software out there, which meanwhile also do not cost any penny. But with the effect, that You have to get comfortable with one, use it, try it, fail, try it again, up to the point in time, that you know "how it's to be done". But also then You will find out, that you'll find any single day something new, you did not know prior.

Mostly it's always the intention of something like: "I want to tell a story." Well tell it. If you do not want to spend time in learning how to tell it in 3D, then only "write" it and find people (who are not so good in telling/writing) who will do the other parts of it. That's the way how (also) the industry works.

(as far as I remember, the MH-idea spread up at Blender and was separated from there, cause Blender is aiming into a more or less global direction of CGI - it's anyway the "combination" of both, which gives the whole picture, also nowadays)