Or: How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love .MHX2<\/p>\n
So I just had a major breakthrough (I’m hoping!) with my NPC interactions. I had glanced once or twice at the work Thomas@MakeHuman<\/a> had been doing, but in my earlier, more sleep deprived days of DaddyDev, I never quite grasped the concepts he was working on.<\/p>\n Ye gods, I’m so freakin’ thrilled I went back to take a second look.<\/p>\n I took one of my MakeHuman characters (the subway token booth clerk) and, after installing the .mhx2 files in Blender and MakeHuman; I re-exported him put him into Blender.\u00a0 Granted, I had to grasp there was an advanced options switch on the Blender import side – but once I activated the face shapes, I was blown away.<\/p>\n I had visemes (phonemes) already plugged in. I could export expressions from MH. Once I added the MakeWalk addon, I could import Mo-Cap .bvh files and apply them to my rig. Delving into the online manual (and a profound thanks to the dev who still does written manuals, I’m sure I will rant yet again about how much I hate video tutorials) I saw there were even more options to smooth out the mo-cap motions, edit the location \/ rotation of bones and once I figure it out, append other .bvh files. What really blew me away was the ability to import MOHO (.dat) lipsync files from Papagayo<\/a>. And I loaded visemes ON TOP of the already loaded .bvh!<\/p>\n With the ability to make a character walk, talk and emote, suddenly a whole new facet of story telling opened up for me. Since I’m not big into programming, I’ve been using Playmaker <\/a>to handle some of the basic interactivity; and after seeing the dev who made the wonderful Rift demo, ‘Coffee Without Words<\/a>‘ made an asset that mimics human eye movement – my NPCs came alive.<\/p>\n Be forewarned, my demo video is NSFW; I made a MH woman with some extended clothing assets, I didn’t realize the bathrobe was translucent, so you see some breasts.<\/p>\n