Eternl Knight wrote:Listen to the video you posted. 1 minute and 10 seconds into it.
Yes, chuck - listen
carefully to what is being said.
I did.
It talks about creating the average faces for male & female individually such that the differences between them and the average face can be used to make a model more or less female/male.
Yes. And in the next paragraph I said that if you average all faces, male and female and call it A; then average all female faces and call it F; then, when you move your slider to female, from the average face, A, you get F. Whatever other attributes you modify, from then on, are modifiers of F, not of A. Same difference.
You completely ignore (purposely or not) the next sentence which is "other facial attributes, such as the fullness of the face, can be manipulated in a similar way".
I ignored it because it's not related to the issue.
Unless you are suggesting that we create foundation meshes for fat, bony, african, middle-eastern, etc, etc in addition to the foundation male & female faces you propose - the argument falls flat.
YOU are the one who hasn't been paying attention to what I say. I did NOT propose to have male and female meshes. I've been proposing ONE mesh: female.
Please, actually read the research material and check your quotes in context before trying to argue about this.
I read them, already; you mean that I should read them again?
This is not something I found on the web and spent a night reading up on; I have done serious work in this area.
I never implied anything about your background.
The same principle is not applicable to MH since we don't have an A-F target set. And in any case, to use A as the basis, and then use A-F and A-M target sets makes A superfluous; --might as well just have F and M.
A = Androngynous, F = Female, & M = Male
Actually, what we have is alot of morph targets taken from the "current" andro mesh which can be applied to either female & male meshes. As soon as we have a female & male mesh - we need to double them.
I wasn't
suggesting that we have M and F meshes. What I said is that what they are doing is mathematically equivalent to having M and F meshes. I wasn't endorsing it; simply pointing out that your putting so much emphasis on them having an A (average face) is misplaced emphasis, since the way the M-F slider is implemented it creates the equivalent of having M and F meshes.
Appeal to Authority is a falacy
Quite true. However, in the scientific method, until such time as a theory is proven false - it can be used as the basis for other theories. Theories that are the most useful tend to be used to implement "practical technologies" (such as electricity generators, weather prediction, and anthropological face/figure generators). So far, I have provided links to a commercial implementation & the theory behind the current state of the art. You, however, have only provided your own anecdotal evidence without any backing it up with practical implementations or even ongoing research (let alone established & implemented technology).
Totally agreed; but it doesn't apply here, since none of the research (that you showed me links to, anyways) ever presents the use of an average face being the "best way" as the subject of research. They merely say "we did this". The implication, to me, is that it seemed like a good idea; so it was done that way. Science is about asking questions, formulating hypothesis, and trying to prove them.
Smart alec debate techniques
Such as ... ?
are not a substitute for knowledge.
Knowledge is very powerful. If you're saying you know the truth and I'm wrong but that my debate techniques are so damn good that I can uphold falsehood and keep your truth at bay, well, thank you!
You might be able to convince others that that your opponent is wrong, but that doesn't make YOU right.
That might be true, but then, what are you going to do about it? There's only one way to establish truth and that is by time-honored dialectics.
Biology is as meaningful to MH as it is to anatomy.<snip/>
Yes, biology is meaningful; however the elements of biology
you brought up (note, that was the important part of what I said before) IS meaningless. It doesn't matter how a body develops in the womb, especially when the project in question (i.e. MakeHuman) doesn't really generate really young figures well (nor can it using the current tech it relies on). Talking about how the body develops biologically from female to male in the womb means nothing in terms of vertices, bone matrices, and rigging.
It means everything. I did not suggest we model a fetus and simulate its growth. But the adult anatomy is quintessentially decided during fetal development. You can exercise or be sedentary; you can eat a lot of pasta, or you can eat steak, but all you'll do is achieve changes that are temporary and conditional, and reversible; but your quintessential anatomy is preserved, and that was decided during fetal growth. In fact, come to think of it, targets could be classified into temporary and permanent. Musclarity, bodyfat, postures and expressions would be temporary. Anyways, if you could show that there are many factors beyond fetal development to consider, I might consider your argument; but in fact the biology in the womb is the sole determinant of our quintessential individuality. The fact that male fetuses go through a roller-coaster of testosterone exposure during fetal development and females don't is very significant, in the sense that if we wanted to have an F-M slider we'd actually need a large number of sliders: F-M1, F-M2, F-M3; --where M1 is the average male among those who got higher testosterone in day 72, M2 are those males who got more testosterone in the womb on day 73, etceteras.
For example, it is somewhat silly to suggest that we should build a rig including breasts when the male rig is very different given the pectoral region will be flatter & made of muscle (& hence moving more with the underlying bones than the female breast).
Again, I've been talking about head and face all along. I would never suggest we have targets to turn female genitalia into male genitalia.
(And before someone tells me that I said I would NOT do the same with the body, read my lips: I advocated nothing about the body; period. Haven't thought about it.)
And if I thought about it, the F-M slider MH works well enough for me. My big concern is faces, really. The goal to strive for is that with a minimal number of targets you can produce ANY face, male or female, exactly. If you used MH to model Christina Aguilera and Brittney Spears, I should be able to tell which is which.
It only makes sense for the anatomy modelling application to take serious consideration of biology on the level you discuss if the knowledge is used in such a way as to make the biology relevant. Given there is not even a "muscle simulator" underneath the mesh - I would posit that biology is only useful where it comes to the outside "appearance" of the mesh. The development & biological origins of the appearance are less important than the efficient generation & posing of the resulting figure.
Posing is as far away from the subject matter as anything gets. The issue here is that males and females are pretty much identical in feature set, but different in the expressions of that feature set; and while females show many hereditary variations, males show similar hereditary variations PLUS a huge combinatorial set of maleness variations due to the time curve of testosterone levels in the womb during fetal development. So there's more feature variation in males than in females. (Something that females seem terribly self-conscious about. Freud was wrong: it wasn't penis envy; it was variability envy.)
In Summary...To summarise, I think MakeHuman is on the right track for the development of human figure
I'll say it one more time, just in case... I'm talking about faces.
given the current state of the art & research in the matter.
I'll say this again too: Show me research that addresses the specific issue of why androgyn
should be the starting point.
If I am mistaken, and MakeHuman is more a research project than an implementation project - than I'll stand back. If, however, MakeHuman's purpose is to take the current knowledge in this field and apply it to an open-source implementation of the ideas - I suggest we follow the current research as I have indicated.
That's like saying that the developers of MH shouldn't think for themselves, but blindly follow whatever the authorities in the subject have decided is right.
NOTE: Body Mesh Research Link:
here &
here
Neither of these links discusses why androgyn
should be the starting point.