On doing a SecondLife Rig

[robertltux]

what would be needed to create a SecondLife compatible Rig for MakeHuman?

http://coadey.com/simplebot_blender26.zip has a copy of a known working SL avatar but what else would be needed??


one big difference is an SL rig has the hips as the root

[ThomasL]

Well, most of the required tools are available, but they are neither documented nor streamlined.

First of all you need a rig file, like the ones in MH/data/tempates. These files were evidently not typed in by hand, so one needs a tool to create them from a blend file. At the moment I cannot find the tools that I used for the existing rig files, though.

One must also have some means to make MH recognize a new rig. The ones that are used today, like the game rig, are hard-wired into the code. It would be nice to have a rig directory under data, where you can put a new rig and it is recognized by MH's user interface, like clothes and hair are today.

Once these tools are in place, the workflow would be like this:

1. Load the rig into blender.
2. Load the base mesh and edit the rig so it fits the mesh.
3. Weight the mesh.
4. Use the makerig script to export a rig file.

But we are not there today.

[duststorm]

Are the three rigs in MH today kept up to date? (or better, do they all still work as they're supposed to)
I think it's a really nice feature that MH offers rigify/game rig alternatives. That takes away a lot of the workflow of manually rigging your clothes and characters.
This is not fully related, but I'm also really impressed by the mocap and retargeting tools in the mhx package for blender.

[duststorm]

Wow, Thomas. You really are fast! >> http://code.google.com/p/makehuman/source/detail?r=3218

[robertltux]

can we get some instructions on how to use the new script (and whats needed for the script??)

[ThomasL]

Some documentation: http://www.makehuman.org/node/177

[duststorm]

I'm really impressed. Thank you for the amazing tools you provide us with. They are an immense help.
On top of that your tutorials are very instructive

Something I was wondering about recently (but not completely related): How do the new mhx mocap tool and the GSOC 2011 motion capture addon from benjy compare? I understand they are two totally separate codebases?
I have experimented with both a bit some time ago but I guess I will have to repeat it more thorougly.
I'm mainly interested in knowing how well both behave, and how they could complement each other.

Also, do you still intend to develop the MHX mocap tools now that Blender has direct support for it, or would you recommend switching?

[robertltux]

Some documentation: http://www.makehuman.org/node/177

mind sharing the rig??

[ThomasL]

The blend file I use can be downloaded from https://rapidshare.com/files/218117158/second_life.blend

I would be interested in hearing feedback. How do you intend to get the rig into Second Life? Can you use the Collada file directly, or will you import the character into Blender first. It looks like the mhx importer works again.

[ThomasL]

Something I was wondering about recently (but not completely related): How do the new mhx mocap tool and the GSOC 2011 motion capture addon from benjy compare? I understand they are two totally separate codebases?
I have experimented with both a bit some time ago but I guess I will have to repeat it more thorougly.
I'm mainly interested in knowing how well both behave, and how they could complement each other.

Also, do you still intend to develop the MHX mocap tools now that Blender has direct support for it, or would you recommend switching?

It was a while since I used Benjy's tool. I think that it is fundamentally sounder, in that it uses less heuristics. OTOH, it did not work with the mhx rig, at least not when I last tried. The problem was that a rig made for hand animation can have a lot of subtle dependencies via constraints etc.

The short answer is that I don't know. I am not actively developing the mocap tool at this time, but that may change in the future.