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Make Target B
When creating new targets with the MakeTarget tool, MakeHuman ™ artists encountered a rather serious misbehavior in how Blender shapekeys work. When editing a mesh with two shapekeys, the pivot point (the small white circle in the pictures below) is not centered on the selected faces. This makes editing a mesh with multiple shapekeys very frustating, and is really holding make MakeHuman development.
MakeHuman ™ considers this to be a bug, but Blender does not. To evade this problem, an alternative version of MakeTarget has been developed. All editing is now done on a special sum shapekey, whereas the real targets have zero value. Since the sum key is pinned, the pivot point is located where it should be.
However, there are now some changes in how MakeTarget works. The sliders in the Make Target panel are not directly coupled to shapekey values (which are always zero for the real targets). Instead, there are three new buttons:
Update Sum: Updates the sum shapekey, based on the values of the sliders. The sum key is set to the weighted sum of the real targets.
Update Active: Updates the active target (always the last one, with the lamp symbol in front of it). The active shapekey is set to the sum minus the weighted sum of the other targets.
Toggle: Toggles in and out of edit mode. This button differs from the normal edit mode toggle in that shapekeys are automatically updated: The sum key is updated when entering edit mode, and the active key is updated when you go back into object mode. The objects current mode is indicated to the right of the Toggle button.
The custom Toggle button is mapped to spacebar. Hence you can toggle in and out of edit mode with spacebar, and the keys are updated correctly. The Tab also toggles edit mode, but ignores the keys, so using Tab should be avoided. For some reason it does not seem possible to overwrite the behavior of the Tab key.
Normally, you only need to update the sum after you move a slider, and the active key should never be updated; that happens automatically with the Toggle button. To prevent you from accidentally ruin your targets, sum updates must be confirmed in edit mode, and active updates must be confirmed in object mode.
In edit mode, many buttons are not available. You need to toggle into object mode to use them.
- Thomas Larsson's blog
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Documentation updates
The documentation is currently undergoing an overhaul. The documentation has been arranged into more logical sections, and work is under way for making a procedure for building a PDF version of it.
Keen visitors of this page may have noticed that there are two different documentation sections: The one reached from the docs menu, and one reached from the resources menu. The difference between them is that the prior is manually written and the latter is autogenerated. Both point to the same base material though. In the future these will be merged, and most likely the autogenerated one will remain.
Documentation may be a boring task, but in the end it is important for the usability of a project. If you feel like you could contribute a documentation article that would fit, write a note on the forums or use the website contact form.
- Joel Palmius's blog
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OS X Nightlies are Back!
UPDATED: OS X nightly builds have returned... with a few changes. First up the good news... OS X builds should now be fully supported on 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion). Going forward we will actively be supporting these platform. If you find problems please report the issues in our bug tracker. We also have a new build server available. Sadly there is also some bad news... we haven't been able to get OS X 10.5 builds working on our Lion build server... so no more OS X 10.5 builds for the time being. If we get a machine to run these (or figure out how to get the necessary 10.5 SDK material installed and running on Lion) we'll try to bring these back. If you know how to do this... please get in contact via the bug tracker. It looks like we've figured out a way to get the older version of Xcode running on Lion, but we need to sort out some issues still (the 10.5 builds seem to be missing their PPC support). Will update further once we get this sorted out.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend.
- Benjamin Lau's blog
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Perfume
Although Perfume is a Japanese band, it is also quite known internationally, so you might have already heard of them. Just last month they released the motion data of the dance routine in their latest song as BVH files. Today I suggested on the crew list to make a video using MakeHuman models for it, but it seems someone already beat us to it: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/miurror/20120403. In case someone wants to redo the experiment, information to obtain and use the data can be found here: http://perfume-dev.github.com/. For people wanting to recreate models or clothes closer to the original video, you can watch the music video here: http://www.perfume-global.com/whatsnew_04.html.
Besides entertainment value, the data might also prove useful for finetuning our rigging and mocap tools.
- mflerackers's blog
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Shoulder poses
Shoulder deformation is a never-ending story..



- Thomas Larsson's blog
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Windows nightly build - again
Yet another new approach is being tried with the windows nightly build, and we are back to bundling python.
Benjamin Lau has helped rescuing the build scripts and written functionality for wrapping the nightly build and dependencies into a windows installer exe. This also contains the necessary parts of python 2.7, so the requirement to install it separately has been removed.
You don't need to uninstall python though. I'm sure you can find something interesting to use it for even when it's not required for makehuman.
The new makehuman nightlies come as exe, which means the url has changed slightly. They are now available at http://download.tuxfamily.org/makehuman/nightly/makehuman-nightly-win32.exe. Please report any broken links on the homepage.
- Joel Palmius's blog
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Updated documentation
Some new documention has been written from scratch. It is for the upcoming alpha 7 release and Blender 2.62, and the following topics are covered:
Export from MakeHuman
MHX (MakeHuman eXchange to Blender)
MakeTarget
MakeClothes
Something about the MakeRig script is also there, but an example needs to be added before it is complete.
- Thomas Larsson's blog
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Windows nightly build
The windows nightly build now works. Almost. The program runs on the build machine and with any machine that has python installed separately (at least if it's a 32-bit python). Unfortunately it fails on machines without python installed, for unknown reasons. The previous approach has been to distribute the python2x.dll file and the core python modules. However, after switching from MingW to VisualC, this no longer seems good enough.
If you are desperate to run the windows nightly builds, you can install python from http://www.python.org/download/ (IMPORTANT! Use the 32-bit installer, even on 64-bit machines). With that installed the nightly builds should work from now on.
Currently I don't really know how to solve the problem (it says "no module named site" eventhough "site.pyc" is available in the pythonmodules directory), so I'm hoping for input from someone smarter than me.
- Joel Palmius's blog
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Linux nightlies back up
The linux nightly builds are back up. The windows nightlies will take a bit longer to restore.
- Joel Palmius's blog
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Planned downtime for nightly builds
Due to a planned reinstallation of a virtualization server, nightly builds will stop updating for a while. At the moment all build servers (except for MacOSX) are hosted on a virtualization server at Contuitus Net Research AB. This server is now in the process of being upgraded and will also change underlying virtualization platform.
Apart from not seing updates in nightly builds for a while, most users should not see any effects of this.
The last update of the nightlies will be tonight, and in the best of worlds everything should be up again by the end of the weekends.
- Joel Palmius's blog
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