Hi everyone, as I’m growing increasingly desperate, I thought I’d try this category. I am looking for someone to update the MHX2 addon for Blender 4.0’s bone collections. It’s not in development anymore but a pretty important part of my pipeline, because it generates a very good custom rig for MakeHuman characters and meshes I created for use in MakeHuman.
All further info can be found in my original thread:
As currently I only use it as a hobby, I cannot pay what I would think is a reasonable fee for a freelance programmer but will absolutely pay (or, rather, “donate”) up to €100 to anyone who thoroughly upates the MHX2 addon, so that the following functions work in 4.0:
import of characters with the MHX rig
working rig UI, inlcuding visibility of bone collections (layers) FK<->IK switch, etc.)
Optional:
working rig UI and functions for imported characters from pre-4.0 Blender (inlcuding rig UI, FK<->IK switch, etc.) - this might be difficult because 4.0 converts layers to collections and I’m not sure if different character imports yield different orders of collections.
Hope someboday wants to tackle it. I will be very grateful!
There are some bugs, like Rigify not working, but mostly the addon in this repo has been working fine up until the last 3.6 version:
Only the bone collections have broken the importer and UI.
I think it would be somewhat complex to support both older MHX rigs which have already been imported into Blender and new rigs imported in 4.0 with an updated addon, because of how Blender handles the conversion of bone layers to collections. But if only the importer and the rig UI need to be updated, so that newly imported models work fine, it should be somewhat straightforward (I hope).
As I understand it, the general problem here is that MHX2 is an ancient system that has been largely abandoned. It has been retained to ensure compatibility with older projects.
Unfortunately, this will not reduce the degree of despair. But what terrible thing can happen if you don’t use the MHX2 addon for Blender 4.0 bone collections now, but work with the version that works correctly with MakeHuman?
Don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely use newer addons if they did what I need them to do. But the new addons don’t actually replace MHX2, they just simplify importing models from MakeHuman, or in the case of MPFB2, basically integrated a modern MakeHuman into Blender. All really nice but nothing I need.
What I use MHX2 for is to get fully rigged characters (with custom rig and rig UI) into Blender in one click. As well as custom proxy meshes which I made. I built a whole pipeline around that the last couple of years and I cannot easily change everything on a dime. If I cannot get MHX2 back, I will use Auto-Rig but that will not be half as quick and speed is of the essence for me, even more important than quality.
Fine. Then clarify for me the versions of makehuman, add-ons and blender that work together for you. And if possible, post a .blend file that works in this combination, but does not work in Blender 4.
Hey, thank you! Someone is now already working on it. But he said he won’t finish everything, like the face rig. I will update the thread and I assume he will fork it or update the repository, so there would be a head-start for anyone interested.
I went through the modified code, but it didn’t suit my needs (I especially need the face panel for face expressions). So I modified the original code from Github so that it doesn’t cause crashes in Blender 4.0 (with any options settings), and the face panel works. I also added extra drivers for the eyelid bones.