Hey everybody!

A few words from my side considering the fantasy version.

The idea of expanding our normal hm08 mesh to a new mesh including some features like a fishtail or wings was something which I tried years ago. The mesh I used was of course not identical but at least similar.

Doing that broke old makehuman of course and a lot did no longer work. This was the main reason for a new more flexible version of makehuman. As you may have noticed the program can also be used for completely different characters like the small robot which was more or less our proof of concept.

With the fantasy version we now are able to add parts like wings which can also be animated. That fantasy mesh has a parameter called “parentmesh” in base.json, this indicates you can also use all assets made for hm08 (except hm08 skeletons, that would make no sense). We have a tool converting morphs (targets) to the new mesh. Like all the other tools we will upload these to the git repository for those who want to convert their own old hm08 morphs.

We struggled both with some problems putting a version on Steam which is stable. We started with pynsist which creates a self-extracting .exe file. Then we found pyInstaller. pyInstaller itself creates code which was not as stable as we hoped. Pyside6 and pyOpenGL created a bunch of dependencies which are not easy to understand. Also the use of “half-deprecated” (not directly supported) openGL features in pySide6 is still a mess (the display of the wireframe mesh is an example, it does not always work, especially mesa implementations might have problems). For pyInstaller especially the macro-targets crashed the system. So we needed to find methods which are more stable. The reason that the macro-targets are now calculated the same way as the normal ones and not in an own parallel thread.

A few things will be changed in near future, ideas are: for that wireframe mesh I want to use an own shader and we will also add a method to reduce the skeleton to the bones used on export etc.

For those not using Steam: the .exe will be available and also the debian package. Also the source code will be always available. The alpha3 version is identical with fantasy version except that the fantasy-mesh is not included. It will be possible to use the alpha3 version and download that mesh to user space as well. My first idea was to only add the fantasy-packet to Steam and go on with alpha3. But it is easier for most of the people to use it by downloading the complete version. However the concept of Makehuman2 is, that the user can put everything also in user space, so add his own base mesh including a bunch of config files without changing the code.

I hope most will work … but hey, I am a programmer and we all know Murphy, so I am sure there will be work left :)

If you have experiences with e.g. putting a native Linux on Steam, we would be happy. pyInstaller itself works for Linux. For those doing experiments, check our build folder on github, the python scripts ppabuild, winbuild and pyinbuild are the scripts we use for debian package, windows exe and pyinstaller package.

Greetings

Black-Punkduck