What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Discussions about user contributed assets. This is a good place to request new assets, as well as requesting support on existing assets that have been downloaded from the user contributions repository.

Moderator: joepal

What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby brkurt » Thu Dec 17, 2015 3:10 am

A lot of criticisms have been aimed at the user contributions, and I think most of them arise from mis-information.

The first set I would like to look at are the criticisms from game developers who don't themselves know how to create 3d models, and are looking for quick solutions, as they are usually in the middle of a project and are under heavy pressure to complete their work on time.

I would place under this category a user who expects are MakeClothes contribution to include: diffuse (finely detailed); bump; normals; specular; displacement. A developer should ask for these things, but the MH contributors aren't quite there yet.

When I design a user asset, it is with teaching in mind, as I make my living as a professional instructor. I mostly want to make sure that there is a symmetrical quad mesh, with a moderate polygon count, so that it can be reduced or subsurfaced as necessary.

My goal as a contributor is to create templates, not finished masterpieces.

That leads me to a discussion of clothes. Most of the clothes I see submitted are modular and skin-tight, which is great for games, but not for graphic artists. We simply do not have an open-source app that can match Marvelous Designer, which for all its wonders, can't create a final mesh that is both symmetrical and pure quad. So photo-realistic folding and draping for an animation is at present out-of-range for MH, and that will probably be the case until Valentina is ready.

In closing, I would ask casual users to be a bit more specific in their requests (demands?).
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby learning » Thu Dec 17, 2015 9:26 am

My goal as a contributor is to create templates, not finished masterpieces.


That is a good idea, but it would only work if there was a simple and easy way to turn a compiled asset back into blender, kind of like reverse-MakeClothes. Currently taking somebody else's work and continuing from where they left is a bit disproportionally tricky.

I wonder, how hard would it be to make like a script or a blender addon that would read .mhclo file, take .obj file from it, position it on MH base mesh, add all the textures listed in default .mhmat and open it up in blender?
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby joepal » Thu Dec 17, 2015 11:01 am

Why do you need to turn a compiled asset back into blender in order to extend a user contributed one?

All you need to do is go file->import->waverfront (.obj) in blender and import the obj file you download from the repository.

You don't get the material assigned automatically, but you get the original mesh including the original UV unwrap.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby joepal » Thu Dec 17, 2015 11:04 am

Maybe I should make a short tutorial on how to extend a user contributed clothing.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby learning » Thu Dec 17, 2015 11:40 am

joepal wrote:Why do you need to turn a compiled asset back into blender in order to extend a user contributed one?

All you need to do is go file->import->waverfront (.obj) in blender and import the obj file you download from the repository.

You don't get the material assigned automatically, but you get the original mesh including the original UV unwrap.

Yeah, I tried this, it kinda works, but the positioning relative to base human is usually all messed up.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby a.g. » Thu Dec 17, 2015 11:50 am

I haven't tried it yet, but maybe the Test Clothes feature in MakeClothes would give a more correct shape? Won't recover the vertex group assignment, obviously.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby joepal » Thu Dec 17, 2015 1:36 pm

learning wrote: but the positioning relative to base human is usually all messed up.


That shouldn't happen unless you mismatch the base mesh type with what the clothes was made for. I.e, if you loaded the vanilla base mesh, but the asset author modeled on the base female or similar.

I only tried loading one object now though (I'm at the office pretending to work), so it might be different from asset to asset I guess. I'll try a few more when I get home.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby a.g. » Thu Dec 17, 2015 3:26 pm

joepal wrote:That shouldn't happen unless you mismatch the base mesh type with what the clothes was made for. I.e, if you loaded the vanilla base mesh, but the asset author modeled on the base female or similar.


Actually, if for example the standard female target is changed in MakeHuman and MakeClothes, trying to use an obj file originally made for a previous target version with the base mesh initialized from the new one may lead to subtle mismatches in places that were changed. Using Test Clothes should refit the mesh to the new version, exactly as MH does when using the clothes.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby jujube » Fri Dec 18, 2015 1:06 am

just speaking for myself here, Daz studio comes with free assets for making realistic sexy humans but that's not what I want, I prefer how makehuman starts with an androgynous human with clean topology, ability to modify it to become any age/race/gender/etc, and the ability to easily export it to blender to be modified.

I wonder if the best thing to do in makehuman's future is not to hope for a large asset library to be created, but to create/improve more pipeline tools for the human model+rig to be exported to a wide variety of programs. The makehuman CC0 license is a huge plus when it comes to using it as a base for editing.
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Re: What do Users Want? or, Who are MH Users?

Postby learning » Fri Dec 18, 2015 5:12 am

joepal wrote:That shouldn't happen unless you mismatch the base mesh type with what the clothes was made for. I.e, if you loaded the vanilla base mesh, but the asset author modeled on the base female or similar.

Yeah, I thought about this too. Is there any information anywhere in .mhclo file as to which base mesh was originally used?
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