unable to save expressions generated by FACSHuman

[jjones]

Hello friends,

I'm using Makehuman Community 1.2.1 alpha. Which I've been using for years, maybe I should upgrade, I don't know, but until today it's worked well enough.

Anyway, I have a character that I spent some time posing and working out some expressions, but I notice that the expressions are not being saved anymore. I know this used to work because I have some characters with saved expressions. Not sure what the issue is?

Here you can see I've modeled him using FACSHuman to have an expression of a kind of bemused listening...

However, after saving the file and reloading it, the expression is lost...

Note that the thumbnails shown in the Load page side bar look like the expression is there, but when I actually load the file, expression is gone. Not sure what could be wrong.

Thank you for any advice, it's a shame to lose all that work posing the character.

I should mention that the expression appears to be saved if I export the model to fbx format, albeit the character loses a lot of definition in the process. Here he is in situ after importing him as fbx into sketchup

I thought maybe it had to do with the facial hair, but removing that does not solve it. I also thought maybe it was a skeleton issue, so I tried other skeletons, to no avail. I definitely have other characters with facial expressions saved. Maybe I just need to start over, maybe it's just a bug somehow with this character, though I don't know what would have introduced it.

Thanks for any suggestions
-jjones

[jjones]

So, I decided to investigate out of my own curiosity. I somehow assumed all these .mh* files would be binary, but they are in fact text files, so that was a pleasant surprise.

Here I did a diff of the model files before and after saving. You can see in the diff that the first file had some characteristics that were not preserved in the saved file.

Code: Select all

diff techguy_leaning_counter_listening3.mhm techguy_leaning_counter_listening3_no_expression_after_save.mhm
3c3
< camera 359.5 318.5 -0.25101980736217516 0.681496764053711 0.5105617875092657 5.912500000000007
---
> camera 358.5 337.0 -0.25101980736217516 0.681496764053711 0.5105617875092657 5.912500000000007
80,87d79
< modifier Upper Face AUs/1 0.416000
< modifier Upper Face AUs/L2 0.631000
< modifier Upper Face AUs/5 0.609000
< modifier Upper Face AUs/7 0.452000
< modifier Lower Face AUs/L12 0.491000
< modifier Eye Positions/63 0.240000
< modifier Head Positions/53 0.366000
< modifier Head Positions/58 0.330000



So maybe that might give someone out there some clue as to what might be going on.

Here are the before (with expressions) and after saving (no expression) mhm model files. Note that I had to add a '.txt' extension in order to be able to upload them here...

before:

techguy_leaning_counter_listening3.mhm.txt

(5.01 KiB) Downloaded 194 times

after saving:

techguy_leaning_counter_listening3_no_expression_after_save.mhm.txt

(4.73 KiB) Downloaded 202 times

[RobBaer]

Expressions don't save with the model. When you make an expression, in utils | expression mixer you will see a save button on the right. You can save your expressionas a /mhpose file that will end up in your expressions folder. That is C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents\makehuman\v1py3\data\expressions on a Windows machine.

You can then reload the expression to a new model from the Pose/Animate | Expressions tab. When you do you will need to drill down 2 levels to ./data/expressions

Hope this helps

[jjones]

Thank you, I feel like I never had to do that before, but maybe I'm crazy, I could be!

Thanks I will try this and see how it works out
-j_jones

[jjones]

[quote="RobBaer"]Expressions don't save with the model. When you make an expression, in utils | expression mixer you will see a save button on the right. You can save your expressionas a /mhpose file that will end up in your expressions folder.

I spent some time looking at the code for makehuman and now I think I understand the problem which probably isn't a problem.

Basically, if you save your model as an '.mhm' file you are just saving a bunch of textual references to clothing, pose, hair, etc.

If you use the expression mixer or the FACSHuman plugin, you are making subtle changes to the actual mesh (positions of vertices in the model's surface, if I have understood the term correctly).

If you want to save those subtle changes to the mesh, you have to save in a different format like fbx or something else. Fbx is what I've tried so far and it seems to work to save the expressions.

And while you are able to save Expressions mixer and FACSHuman expressions to a text format, those formats are not part of the mhm format and so not going to be saved when you save the model in the main File->Save menu.

Also, sorry I posted all this in the wrong forum.

Thanks again
-j_jones