How to Make Custom Armature?

[duststorm]

I revisisted the code, and this is what you are hitting your head against:

https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehum ... ing.py-179

Code: Select all

[None, None, None] #This data will be filled by hand in the exported file.

It's not documented anywhere else except for in the exporter code (but then again we did mention it was a development tool not ready for production yet). But it basically says that this property of skeletons has to be added in by hand, after the export.
Alternatively you should remove all the lines that say reference_plane from your skeleton file, but by doing that your bone rolls will be random, and probably not something useful.
This is no problem for loading poses, but it makes life more difficult when using the rig in tools like blender, as the bone axes will not have logical directions, which makes posing more difficult.

[Jnjngfvgf]

I see, well if there is no fix. Here's a step by step video of what I did. Hope it helps.

[Edtion]

He told you (not very clearly) how to fix it for import, he just didn't explain the bones-to-center problem.

At the bottom of the mhskel file (before the last section with information and etc) is a category of bones with 3 sublines per [bone]____plane. the blender-export leaves those lines with null, you have to replace the null lines with bone names, for some sort of axis thing or whatever, OR (I believe he was saying) you just remove the lines and have their normals broken out of MakeHuman.
The Default.mhskel has all the original bone settings, so you could copy them to your exported mhskel and guess which bones yours should revolve around and get it all working properly that way.

But that still doesn't solve the distorted bones thing. Maybe the exporter automatically fails "somewhere" and causes that.

[duststorm]

What I said was: that plane references need to be defined by hand in the file directly. There is no gui or tool for this.
Basically what you do is define the name of three joint helpers (the have vertexgroup names, check the basemesh obj for that), for every plane. Every bone references such a plane. This plane defines the plane in which that bone moves, the main rotation axis (x) of this bone is along the normal of this plane.
For inspiration, see the default skeleton or the other ones included in MH.

If you can't be bothered with this, and don't care that you have rigs with broken rolls, then just remove everything containing the word "plane" in the mhskel file.

"Distorted bones" (although I have to admit I don't really know what you mean), is probably because the mesh the skeleton was created for is not the mh basemesh (with helpers), or has a wrong vertex order.

[duststorm]

I see, well if there is no fix. Here's a step by step video of what I did. Hope it helps.

Why do you destroy the vertex weights of the rig by applying "auto vertex weights"? That's probably a mistake.
Also, when you try posing the rig, the clothes helpers do not move, that's another mistake.

A step is missed in the video: opening the test.mhskel file in a text editor (eg notepad) and defining the bone orientation planes. That is why the skeleton does not load in MH.

[Jnjngfvgf]

Oh Ok I see now, I was hoping I might have been doing something wrongly thanks for the help I'll do what you said and try to see if it helps thanks again.

[Edtion]

So I wanted to rename all the bones/weights of the MH rig to the deformation bones of BlenRig. I went through the mhskel file to rename the bones but found that you'd still have to modify the weighting file, so I renamed all the bones in Blender to do it with the script but then after learning that blender doesn't auto-rename weights after renaming the bones, I found an addon that will do it, so then I renamed all the bones again.
I went through the two rigs copy&pasting each bone name at least 3 times now and I can't get them into Makehuman. So I finally decided to go back to the basics and just do an import/export.

First, load Base Female through MakeClothes (because it's better to look at) >> Import Default MHSkel >> Rename some bones >> Export MHSkel >>
Copy planes section of Default.mhskel to the renamed.mhskel >> Rename the bones in mhskel as well (or don't) >> Load to MakeHuman
The renamed bones are missing, as are the weights.

Just renaming bones in mhskel and mhw produce the jenkins error.

I gave up on modifying the armature but I don't want to give up on modifying the weights (which is all I want now). Currently the only workaround I have in mind on keeping the weights is to reuse the mesh data of the on I renamed with an applied-shapekey-transfer.
P.S. Skipping the renaming parts sends the tails of [upperarm01.L] and [upperarm01.R] to the origin/0,0,0.

[duststorm]

Have a look at the log in MakeHuman to see what exact error you are getting.
That could help in determining what is wrong with the rig.