Notes on this post wrote: This is not a post criticising the direction of the MakeHuman developers, not is it any form of "demand" on my part. It is simply an outline of what I would like at the end of the MakeHuman rainbow My needs are not other people's needs and, as such, I know not everyone will agree with me.
OK, firstly - I love the underlying concept of MakeHuman. The idea of having a dedicated humanoid character creator (complete with pretty damn awesome rigging/posing results) with the most common/powerful morphing controls summarised into the low dimension controls (i.e. the "tetra-parametric" UI widgets) is incredibly useful for those of us that don't like modelling, morphing and re-rigging a common base mesh every time we need to add height, bulk ,breasts, etc.
That said, I think there is an "ultimate goal" (for me) which would have MakeHuman an essential (rather than "preferred") part of every studio's pipeline. I outline these below:
Alternate Topologies: Whilst the current topology is damn good, it is not the best for every situation. Especially in some subdivision-based applications, the number of triangles can be prohibitive for properly smooth surfaces. And while 11K polygons is small for "high resolution" animation & imagery - it is quite high for game meshes. I have used MakeHuman once for the creation of a morphing game character. The project never got publisher approval, but effort required to move the crafted MakeHuman form to the low-res game form was non-trivial!
There are two ways I think for this to work. One is to simply allow for meshes to connect the vertices in whatever way they like (or even leave vertices out of the quad/tri mesh). This is a "simplistic" solution, but has worked for other hacks similar in purpose I have tried before. The other is to have the alternate mesh deformed in much the same way as clothing (detailed next).
Clothing Matching Morphs & Posing: The MakeHuman mesh has had alot of effort put into it to ensure that the morphs, joint rotations, etc all work out smoothly. Thing is, we need to clothe these magnificent creations... which requires being able to import, fit, and rig the clothes to our generated humanoid. It is not feasible to follow the standard MakeHuman editing process for this (think of all the man hours so far in correcting morph combinations, joint movements, etc).
My suggestion is that we use the underlying MESH for the rigging of the clothing. There is a technique I used to use for moving clothing from rig-to-rig while using Poser. It uses the triangles of a mesh as the "rig controller", with the vertices of the "deforming" (i.e. clothing) mesh being weighted to each triangle based on proximity & triangle normal. As the triangles are moved, rotated & scaled, so too would the vertices of the clothing mesh. For moving from one figure to another, I would simply sculpt a common "rig" mesh to approximate the "source", sculpt the same mesh to approximate the "target" and then use the "skin deformer" code to weight & transform the vertices of the clothing mesh based on these approximations. I used approximation meshes as Poser meshes are VERY high res for simply transforming clothing models. Cutting the polygon count down of the "rig mesh" vastly decreased the time required to calculate the weights & transformation.
It would rock if this (or a similar) technique were available to clothe the figure once he/she/it is finished being morphed. A secondary benefit is that this can be used to pose the clothes as well.
MakeHuman as Plugin: My final dream goal would be to have MakeHuman as a plugin to other applications. Currently you can create and (with some fiddling) pose the figure, but for best use you have to export this out and import into another application. This hence only works if you are creating static images, as animation is simply a no go (you either rig in the external app, losing the cool joint morph corrections or worse export a series of OBJ meshes to be rendered each frame... urgh!). My ideal would be that the MakeHuman figure AND rig is imported into another application (Blender atm simply due to the Open Source nature making it more feasible). If the bones can be used as the "input" to the MakeHuman posing engine - it would be possible to add a "real" rig with IK/FK, advanced controllers, etc. With an advanced rig suited to the project driving the MakeHuman engine (i.e. I pose using the "internal" rig and the MakeHuman engine morphs the mesh to nmatch using all it's cool addtions). With the clothing option above, it would be possible then to use MakeHuman in features without having only the basic "shape/form" morphs applied.
Let me know what you guys think (good or bad). The skin deformer stuff I am willing to help with as I already have (semi-optimised) code that does this.
--eK