Updating the wiki

[FairyTail]

Yes, sorry, I should have made it clearer. Floating an image is part of the "File" tag. For example:

Code: Select all

 == What is a Target?  The MakeHuman Morphing Process. ==

[[File:Morph1.png|left]] The principle is simple. A target is a modifcation to a base mesh shape that does not alter the mesh itself but that stores information that permits the base mesh to be transformed into the target shape using ‘morphing’.  Targets are what allow the slider controls in MakeHuman™ to take a single base mesh for a character and morph the shape of that character based on a variety of different feature target files.  The many target files used by MakeHuman™ can alter a single human base form into characters with features as different as those distinguishing male from female to as subtle as varying the shape of a single earlobe.

A target contains the offsets by which vertices of the human base model (base.obj) deviate from the original to achieve a specific feature. eg. a long nose could be a target.  These targets can be combined and MakeHuman™ uses them by blending targets together and gradually applying them to the base mesh to create a nearly endless variety of human forms.  Below are examples of target blending obtained by choosing a target that defined the character as male and combining that target with the extreme settings for other targets that determned the muscle tone or weight of the character.
 
MakeHuman™ handles morphing with a special file format, ".target".
<br style="clear:both" />

The final

Code: Select all

<br style="clear:both" />

is needed to clear the float.

So, now the image is floated to the left, the text is on the right, and what follows after "clear:both" is aligned normally.

[ThomasL]

I have one more immediate question: the base mesh in MakeTarget and the base mesh in MakeHuman are subtly different. It would be very useful if exporting the initial MakeHuman mesh with no modifications was the same as the base mesh in MakeTarget. I've looked at the source tree, and the obj files were created at different times.

The reason is this: MakeTarget is not executed in the Blendertools folder. As a Blender add-on, it is supposed to be copied or linked into the folder where Blender looks for add-ons, which on my Win7 machine happens to be "C:\Users\Thomas\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.75\scripts\addons". So MT does not know where MH is located. In order to find base.obj at a well-defined location relative to the MT script, a copy was made and put into the maketarget folder.

This flipside of this approach is that the MT copy does not get updated when the MH version of base.obj is modified. They were the same at some moment, but have diverged since.

An alternative approach would be to let the user provide a path to the MH folder (the right MH folder, if the user has several copies of MH installed). The MH path would be a scene property that is displayed in the MT panel. This is how MT originally worked, but it led to confusion when people did not have MH installed at the default location.

Is there a safe way to replace the MakeTarget mesh with one exported from MakeHuman (with all the helpers and the default rig), or what parameters were used to create the MarketTarget mesh?

Apart from the rig, just copy base.obj from MH to MT. They are supposed to be the same. Another way is to export a character from MH and import into Blender. Make sure that the character is nude (no hidden faces) and that helpers is selected in the export options, if you want them. You won't get the nice color-coding for helpers, though.

[FairyTail]

The debian MakeHuman nightly build installs base.obj in /usr/share/makehuman/blendertools/maketarget/data/ and this gets copied to ~/.config/blender/2.74/scripts/addons/maketarget/data/base.obj

Code: Select all

:~/BASE$ locate base.obj | xargs md5sum
c84ebea08cd1c74fd57d45636f79d8b1  ~/.config/blender/2.74/scripts/addons/maketarget/data/base.obj
c84ebea08cd1c74fd57d45636f79d8b1  /usr/share/makehuman/blendertools/maketarget/data/base.obj

This is the same base.obj as joepal retrieved from the repo

Code: Select all

14:47:13 [joepal@virtual makehuman-unstable]$ md5sum blendertools/maketarget/data/base.obj makehuman/data/3dobjs/base.obj
c84ebea08cd1c74fd57d45636f79d8b1  blendertools/maketarget/data/base.obj
c84ebea08cd1c74fd57d45636f79d8b1  makehuman/data/3dobjs/base.obj
14:47:21 [joepal@virtual makehuman-unstable]$


In the same post,

The thing is, some targets are always applied [in MakeHuman], even if you didn't pull any sliders, making it hard to compare the basemesh as seen in MakeTarget with the one seen in MakeHuman.

This implies that the vertices of any clothes fitted to the mesh in MakeClothes won't exactly match the start-up mesh in MakeHuman since some targets have already been applied before any cloth is added to the figure. Presumably, the cloth is scaled to fit the pre-targetted mesh. It should be possible to show if there is any difference by applying a UV test pattern to unmodified MakeClothes tights in Blender and looking for any distortion in MakeHuman.

Because I didn't understand what was happening at the time of my question, I started a new thread. Since then, I've figured out how to make targets that work in the way I expect in MH.

[FairyTail]

So I copied base.obj anyway, and the differences are obvious

[duststorm]

Indeed, the fact that base.obj in MakeClothes/MakeTarget and MakeHuman data folder are allowed to diverge is a bug in our deployment system.
In fact, the fact that the same file (base.obj) is duplicated in the bitbucket repository is a bug as well. It should be stored once only, to ensure it's always up to date.
It should be up to the deployment script to copy the base.obj file and any macro targets to the right blendertools folder when creating a nightly or release package. Either that, or the blender scripts should be configured by the user to point to the MakeHuman installation folder (this would be even better as there is no chance of the installed version of MakeHuman and blendertools diverging).

[FairyTail]

The best thing about standards is that there are so many from which to choose.

There's also the concept of "average" male/female. The average basketball player and the average flat-racing jockey might have something to say about that. Or compare the physique of the average boxer from light to heavyweight.

Then there's customization versus portability. My custom targets will be perfect for the meshes I'm working on, but they won't be portable. The assets in the library will be perfectly portable, but they probably won't fit my meshes.

Anyway, I've edited some talk pages on the wiki. Rob Baer commented on his talk page that a common look and feel will make [] a better Wiki. I've taken the liberty of editing the Documentation_Talk:Index as a starting point for discussing the look and feel of the wiki, and also for discussing editing policies . I noticed, for example, that joepal named all of his tutorial images sequentially. I should state that I am particularly critical of some style guides, especially the chicago manual of style, but that's another rant entirely.

Please see Help:Talk_pages if you're unfamiliar with editing talk pages.

@joepal: would it be worth starting a general discussions thread purely for discussing the wiki? Off-topic posts getting deleted on sight?

[joepal]

@joepal: would it be worth starting a general discussions thread purely for discussing the wiki? Off-topic posts getting deleted on sight?

I don't know about deleting stuff, but a thread for discussing the wiki is a good idea. It belongs in the "community discussions" subform rather than here though.

[ThomasL]

Either that, or the blender scripts should be configured by the user to point to the MakeHuman installation folder (this would be even better as there is no chance of the installed version of MakeHuman and blendertools diverging).

This is technically trivial to implement, but it comes with a big drawback: somebody must answer questions and complaints from users whose MakeTarget (and MakeClothes) does not find the data.

EDIT: OTOH, letting the MH and MT base meshes go out of sync is really bad, since it may introduce subtle errors in the targets that go unnoticed. I really don't have a strong opinion about what is the right thing to do. However, people are already complaining that in particular MakeClothes is too complex to use. Forcing the user to manually specify the location of the MH directory is not going to simplify things.