Coming: MH Hair to and fro Blender Particles

[jcapco]

Hi..

Just want to let you guys know that Im developing some tools in mh so you can have things converted to and fro blender Particles. This makes hair styling and development very much easier. I will write a tutorial on how to make a new hair within 20 minutes. I have only one wish once I developed the new tool and released it in makehuman.... Please please please contribute some of your cool new hairstyles to makehuman, this will help us provide a bigger choice of hairs in our library.

[workinprogress]

Sounds like a wonderful idea .

comment added: Yes I would be very pleased to contribute blender created hairstyles.
( if I can figure out how to do that when the time comes) I've been hoping for a way someone with my limited abilities could contribute.

[jcapco]

Thanks for the wait:
http://jcapco.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/15-minutes-tutorial-from-blender-hair-particles-to-makehuman-hair

[workinprogress]

Thanks for the tutorial
I've run into a couple little snags though, How can I set the axis of the template head blend back to z-up while I work on it, then revert it back to Y-up when the particle system is edited and ready for separation from the mesh, conversion and export? Is there a wiki page you can point me to? Failing that, how can I append the mesh to a new blend, I tried but it seems nothing is actually appended when I do that. I get no object at all, not even an empty.
I'm using blender 2.49b.

oh, and should I apply materials and textures to the hair particle system, or just leave the default material on it, so that MakeHuman's hair material textures, etc. will be applied?

I'm sure these all sound like idiot questions, and Maybe they are, but I'm asking anyway.
( I can always regret it tomorrow.)

[jcapco]

Thanks for the tutorial
I've run into a couple little snags though, How can I set the axis of the template head blend back to z-up while I work on it, then revert it back to Y-up when the particle system is edited and ready for separation from the mesh, conversion and export? Is there a wiki page you can point me to? Failing that, how can I append the mesh to a new blend, I tried but it seems nothing is actually appended when I do that. I get no object at all, not even an empty.
I'm using blender 2.49b.

There isn't a wiki page I know. You can rotate your view if you want to view the head up, but apparently you want to rotate the entire head. Here is what you do:

Make sure you are in side-view
Select the head
Go to View --> View Properites
Set the cursor position to 0,0,0
Select base rotation to be around the cursor (see this )
Press R
Then type 90 or -90 (Im cant remember the rotation convention for blender, it's either clockwise or counterclockwise.. anyway you will know when you try)

If you want to revert back to Y-up, do the same steps except that you use the negative of the number (in angles) you use for the last step. And make sure that the rotation is over the origin (where we place the cursor), otherwise things will not look correct in makehuman.

oh, and should I apply materials and textures to the hair particle system, or just leave the default material on it, so that MakeHuman's hair material textures, etc. will be applied?

Not needed at this stage. After modelling the hair and exporting it as an obj file for use in makehuman only curves are saved.. curves dont have any material property, so it doesn't make sense to have material and texture.

There are two ways you will have final model render with hair using makehuman, either you render it with aqsis/pixie with the given hair (which is not yet functional using our new made hair, it should be within a week of development, so stay on watch for the nightly builds) or you export it as mesh and apply material, texture, uv etc. in blender and then render it there.

As a final note, I might think of adding a hair-style competition this may challenge the modellers and at the same time contribute to makehuman hair library I will think about that in the future.

[workinprogress]

Thank you ,
What I wanted, was not so much to change the rotation of the head, but just to set things up, so that both the scene and the head will have the same up-axis. The only way I could think of was to rotate the axis of the head so that z would become it's up-axis without changing it's orientation. I Hoped that once this was done, the key commands would work normally again and I could work with less frustration, numpad 1 giving me a full face frontal view, with the top of the head at the top, and numpad 3 giving me a side view, etc. If I could just change the up-axis of the scene it would be much simpler but I don't know if that is possible.

I will try again and see if I can make better progress.
My poor computer often crashes blender if I try to edit particle systems on a full character model, or use texture paint so I was really glad to have just the head template to work on. Good to know I wont have to consider the materials.

I may not come up with anything useful, but I will do my best.
a competition sounds like it could be a good Idea.


I'm curious to see how the particle system hair translates into MakeHuman hair.

Added comment in edit: I followed your instructions for changing the rotation of the head to match the scene, it worked perfectly and easily, and now particle system editing tools like puff work properly again.