For an upcoming game I've been thinking of trying to model a universal human that be customized in code. It would include posable bones representing many aspects of the model. For example, one or more bones representing the nose could be scaled on any axis, rotated or transposed (moved) to alter the shape, size and general appearance of the nose. Do the same for the eyes and eye sockets, forehead, cheek bones, chin, ears, hair, facial hair, etc.. The skin and clothes could use dynamic textures made in code too, by drawing to render targets.
The point of all this is to allow the could to create multiple instances of the human model, and pick a set of transformations for each to make unique people. That could be used to make NPCs, or to let players customize their own characters.
This is what I did with fishing lures in Bass Tourney Challenger, with a single model in Blender with many different components that can be sculpted, scaled, or omitted to create an unlimited variety of lures. Of course doing it with a human, and getting good results, would be much, much harder. So I'm looking for any existing model like that.
I'm experimenting with MakeHuman. It seems to be an open source project to produce exactly that - a universal mesh that can be altered by posing various components. If it can do that, with a model that can be imported into Gideros, that would be fantastic. It seems to have a lot of community assets like clothes, but they often fail to scale to match the changes to the model, so it might be necessary to add or modify clothes in Blender. I've just scratched the surface, but it seems fairly promising, at least compare to trying to build something like that from scratch.
So I'm wondering - Has anybody tried working with MakeHuman at all, or anything like that?
Paul
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In makehumans application,
If you want the same behavior in Blender you will have to use makehumans mpfb https://static.makehumancommunity.org/mpfb.html
Hope this helps
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I'm seeing fitting problems even within MakeHuman. Some garments seem to fit, at least mostly, while others not well at all. Here's the same model in the same pose with the the sample work suit and formal suit, as seen in MH:
Maybe this is an issue with the specific version of MakeHuman I'm using. I'll play around with MPFB and see how that goes.
These seem like pretty useful free tools for indie developers. I'm also looking at Reallusion's Character Creator. That appears to be vastly more powerful, evidently capable of making Hollywood quality characters, but it's far from free, especially once you start buying assets like garments. It seems like major overkill for indie mobile games, but it's fascinating to see what's possible.
Thanks again!
Some makehumans clothes are ccby so be sure to know what you are using.
There is also this awesome characters creator website https://readyplayer.me/ but unfortunately the license as far as I understand is:
https://readyplayer.me/terms
I have been looking into Reallusion's Character Creator too but decided that makehuman would be enough for my use case
Then there is also mixamo.com of course where you can use their models (as you wish?).
I use a mix of those, plus some awesome assets made by awesome people on sketchfab.com now fab.com.
The next step will be to see if I can bring a character like that into a Gideros app and have the code toggle on and off or alter different components. If so that will achieve the single model that can represent many characters that I'm after. If that proves too cumbersome it clearly wouldn't be too much work to create a reasonable set of characters separately with CPFB.
And perhaps jump down the rabbit hole of learning to make original clothes for CPFB.
Thanks again!
Likes: MoKaLux
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Fragmenter - animated loop machine and IKONOMIKON - the memory game
In my app I deform Blender models (position, rotation, scale). In order for some things to work I have to "cut" (separate) the model into several meshes. That may be what you want to do if you want to scale the eyes, nose, ...
All the best for your Gideros project
This is really cool stuff! The process for creating assets like clothes seems pretty straightforward. I just whipped up a pair of snow pants, and they fit, pose and scale like they should. Where were these tools 17 years ago when I was modeling people and clothes from scratch?
So your tool bulk generates 2D sprites from 3D objects? That's really cool! Some of my games do something similar at runtime, posing 3D models and generating 2D images to using during game play. But your tool looks so much more flexible! That's a really clever app!
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If I remember correctly the steps:
- in blender I have a 3d human character with "human" proportions (my models are around 1.8m tall)
- export as fbx to mixamo (no textures but that's fine because we will add those back in blender)
- add a mixamo animation -> export to fbx (first download model and tpose)
- add a mixamo animation -> export to fbx (then you can only download pose)
- repeat above step for as many animations as you want
- once all animations downloaded, back to blender
- in one collection I put the T-pose model and fix the textures
- in another collection I put all the mixamo animations (skeletons)
- in blender Animation tab you can switch between animations and they should work on the T-pose model
- once I am happy with the animations, I hide the mixamo collection and only export the fbx tpose model (mesh + armature) which should have all the other animations attached
Once the blender and mixamo stuff is done:
- fbxconv to convert your blender fbx to gideros json
- from there you can animate your model
In your case you are using bones for the face which are not available in mixamo. What I could suggest:
- use the mixamo rig + add your own bones for the face (blender has a face rig available)
- use the mixamo weight paint for the body and manually weight paint the face
https://github.com/makehumancommunity/mpfb2/issues/169
I'm still exploring options. I tried joining the head parts of the mesh and the head parts of default MPFB2 rig with the import Mixamo rig and mesh. That works as far as getting the character walking while also being able to manipulate the face bones, but I'd have to manually weight the vertices around the severed neck to make it more correctly. But then one also can't add assets to the mesh, since MPFB no longer considers that a base mesh. So I'd have to apply all the assets before making the merged rig.
Then I found this: This demonstrates using the AMHB2 (Automate Make Human for Blender 2) addon. With that you can select two armatures in Blender, the Mixamo and then the full rig, and then retarget the full rig to the Mixamo, making a transfer rig. That almost works. In my case, with a default MH model and rig, plus an imported Mixamo rig with a walk cycle, I end up with the character walking, and also with the posable facial bones, and to which it's still possible to apply assets without redoing other steps, which is the goal, but...
There are a few glitches. In the YouTube tutorial they end up with thumbs positioned wrong that have to be manually posed. In my case the shoulders are wrong, and the model walks with his arms crossed through his chest. Maybe the solution is as simple as starting with a model in the T pose rather than the MH default. Or I'm missing a step from the tutorial, so I'll have to go over that again.
Hopefully the community will add the functionality to simply import the Mixamo animation and automatically map it to the corresponding bones in the other rigs, but for now this seems like the best solution.
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