Licensing on Videogame features

[chief]

Hi,
I realise I'm bumping a slightly old topic but it comes up as the best result on google so I figured it best to ask here as opposed to a new thread since it's related.

Since I don't want to step on anybody's toes I just wanted to make absolutely sure I'm understanding that I could do the following as a character customisation system within a commercial game due to the exports being CC0.

I *think* I can if I understand joepal 's quote correctly but before I put the work in I just wanted to check.

So creating the system would go something along these lines:

1) Use MakeHuman in its' default state and drag each slider (for the adjustments I'd want) either to the extreme left or extreme right.
2) For each slider position export out the resulting mesh as an fbx file.
3) Within a 3D application, create a morph map between the two meshes that represent each minimum/maximum value.
4) Merge all these morphs into one file, this would mean the unmodified (all morphs at 0) mesh would be identical looking to the MakeHuman startup mesh.
5) Potentially change the head of the mesh since while I have nothing against the current head I have a selection of others to use in its' place, and also reduce the polygon count down to game engine levels.
6) Import into a game engine (rig etc.), setup a UI to adjust these morph maps via player input controls - let the player create their custom character for within the games environment (no exporting/extracting by legitimate means).

So, I wouldn't be using any code, and I'd be doing all the morphing inside a 3D application which I think is what joepal considered as being fair use under the CC0 but I thought it prudent to ask.

Chief.

[jcpalmer]

I have no opinion license wise, but I am not sure that this is going to be all that feasible, technically. Morphing vertices is one thing, but some of these sliders change the length of bones. Worse even the location is not always the same. For a commercial game, I cannot imagine not being able to move the resulting character would get much traction. True, not all sliders would change bones, but you would have to check one slider at a time. Age, height are definitely going to cause problems.

I am doing something similar, technically, but not for character generation. Expressive speech is extremely difficult to pull off. Very simple expressions of each character needs to be produced so that they can dynamically assembled on the fly in final deployment. Here is a test scene. I do it completely within MH using custom expression which MH can save for you on request. I had to get inventive on how to get these out (it is shared in the community addin for Blender), since exporters only deal with the stock expressions & ignore custom ones. This is also where I observed you have to extract the bones for each character for each expression, AND each expression involves both rotation & location changes.

[joepal]

It is not clear to me what is different with what you are trying to do compared with what was asked above.

I reiterate: If you use the GUI of an official release of MH to produce a bunch of toons, you are then free to cut, paste and morph between these as you see fit. I don't see how you would have recreated or reverse-engineered any AGPL:ed asset or code this way, so AGPL is not applicable in this case.

[chief]

Hi,
Thanks for both responses and thank you joepal for the clarification. I thought that I had understood you correctly, however I didn't want to put in the work until I was absolutely sure, which is why I put my intentions as a list so you could see exactly what I was planning.
Chief.