morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

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morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:09 pm

What i'm really missing is a export of morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers (.mhm content like weight, height, body part sizes); i only see morph keys for the face.
Is it possible to get more of these modifiers as keys exported in mhx2, maybe available as plugin or community content?
Or is somebody already working on it / may i help to get them exported?
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby joepal » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:43 pm

I think this is what you want: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=18528
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:58 pm

Yes, that sounds exactly what i am looking for. Thank you for the instant response! :D

I've read AssetDK's tutorial, that helped me a lot, but i missed to follow his link there to this other tutorial. :roll:
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Tue Jan 26, 2021 5:42 pm

Currently only faceshapes are supported. In import_runtime_mhx2/importer.py it is importing them over the faceshapes.mxa.

So the next step for getting body shape keys is to enable MakeTarget2 for something else than face and create mxa including targets for, maybe include adding some magic lines to the importer?
:?
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby punkduck » Tue Jan 26, 2021 8:07 pm

Phew it is not as easy, but possible

Use maketarget2, it is able to load the shapekeys to your human, as long as the vertex order did not change. Be aware that clothes and proxy topology is following body or helper inside MakeHuman so it is only working on standard body. The keys are made for body + helper. If you want to do it other meshes, you need a weight-copy inside Blender etc etc etc and then you can leave out MakeHuman in between ;)

But before you do so, take a note on this:

A shape key, even if it just changes a single vertex, is a complete mesh-copy inside blender. The export to MakeHuman only contains the changed vertices, but inside blender it needs memory.
MakeHuman has sth. about 1000 of these shapekeys/morphs. Some of the makehuman morphs are macro ones combined from a lot of others. Most of the official ones have sliders going to left and right, so these are two shapekeys or morphs for the same change.

Maybe for a test take a look here:

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/Documentation:TargetsV2

with maketarget2 you can load a target from makehuman directly, scroll down to "load a target". Then you can see how it was done. No rocket science.

unfortunately you need targets uncompressed from Github in this case, here you can find them:

https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman/tree/master/makehuman/data/targets
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby joepal » Wed Jan 27, 2021 7:02 am

A second problem with supporting targets as shape keys on the blender side is what is supposed to happen when using one.

Assume you have a target "pregnant woman". You can drag the shape key slider from 0 to 1 and back and watch the belly grow and shrink.

For a base mesh model without any proxies or clothes, implementing this is trivial. We already have that functionality in MakeTarget. Supporting secondary or even a lot of targets is also not a big deal.

However, what is supposed to happen if you do have proxies and clothes? If the character has a t-shirt and the belly grows, there is no magical way of automatically getting the t-shirt to grow too. If only modifying the base mesh, the belly would immediately poke through the t-shirt when moving the slider.

The relation between a vertex on the base mesh and a vertex on proxies/clothes is what is described by mhclo files, using rather advanced calculations with barycentric coordinates, vector algebra and whatnot. All these calculations happen in MakeHuman atm. Only the result is posted in the export.

If we want to be able to support targets as shapekeys and have this also modify the whole proxy/clothes stack, then we'd have to reimplement that whole set of code on the blender side. We'd also have to implement drivers for the shape keys to trigger secondary shape keys.

It would obviously be desirable and in all kind of ways great to be able to support targets in this fashion. But so far I've hesitated to even begin trying to implement this functionality, as I'm not all that sure I'd even succeed with porting the makehuman clothes calculation code to blender in a functional manner.
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Wed Jan 27, 2021 9:57 am

First a big thank for revealing all these details, I need some time now to read through it.

The question i raised is maybe a common use case ... offering the new character to be customized by the player (seen in many games).
When it comes to clothing, it seems the solution has to be engine specific, and I need even more time to investigate this. I`ll be back. 8-)
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Wed Jan 27, 2021 10:07 am

For clothing i have a plan:
I found what tool is currenly (UE4.16+) in unreal: https://conanexiles.gamepedia.com/Modding_Cloth_Physics
And for Conan Exiles (UE4.15) there exists is a manual: https://conanexiles.gamepedia.com/Modding_Cloth_Physics
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby fortuna » Wed Jan 27, 2021 12:56 pm

For understanding: Is this correct? ->
- Animations are based on rigs/bones, so clothes must be based on rigs/bones too?
- Since this works only particular correct with clothes in MakeHuman even without shape keys when skin under clothes is not removed. Clothes would need the keys generated by a mapper from the keys of the body. A cloth.mhclo file maps vertices, but no remapped shape keys of the body, mapped to the new vertex groups are included in the process, so clothes can't be scaled by (the same) shape keys?
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Re: morph keys for existing Makehuman Modelling modifiers

Postby joepal » Wed Jan 27, 2021 1:31 pm

fortuna wrote:For understanding: Is this correct? ->
- Animations are based on rigs/bones, so clothes must be based on rigs/bones too?
- Since this works only particular correct with clothes in MakeHuman even without shape keys when skin under clothes is not removed. Clothes would need the keys generated by a mapper from the keys of the body. A cloth.mhclo file maps vertices, but no remapped shape keys of the body, mapped to the new vertex groups are included in the process, so clothes can't be scaled by (the same) shape keys?


That's basically it. Clothes are automatically rigged using the same skeleton as the body on import, so animation is done via posing.

While theoretically possible to implement, there is no functionality available today for applying shape keys to clothes outside MH.

If someone wants to give it a go (implementing shape keys for clothes in for example blender), I can explain the basic algorithms and a give a few hints on what would be needed in terms of input data.
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