MakeHuman Add-on No Longer 100% Compatible

MakeHuman is a wonderful program (and I think version 1.8 will likely blow many people away), and the .MHX add-on for Blender has always produced beautiful models with beautiful Rigs.

However…I just saw at the MakeHuman site that the MakeHuman add-on is no longer immediately compatible with Blender:

For quite some time I have been testing MHX export against Blender 2.66.5, because it was a nice, stable version and I felt no need to update. But yesterday I downloaded the Blender 2.68 RC to verify that everything worked fine. It didn’t!

Blender has adopted a stricter security policy, described here. The idea is that python scripts should not be run automatically when the user opens a blend file, like macros are not executed automatically when you open a file in Word or Excel. In particular, scripted drivers are stored in the blend files and are hence disabled by default. Unfortunately, the mhx rig utilizes scripted drivers, so it will no longer be imported correctly into Blender.

To make the mhx importer work, one must therefore allow Blender to automatically run python scripts. The setting is found in the File tab of the User Preferences window.

So my reason for this post is just to make smarter and more active Blender/MH users than I aware of this, so that they can find some way to circumvent it. For instance, perhaps running the MH add-on can be made to automatically disable this security measure? Or maybe MH files can somehow be given some sort of master priority so that they’re allowed to run scripts automatically?

I just hope that Blender and MH continue to be fully compatible, because there really isn’t any better way of creating a Rigged, lifelike model, in my opinion.

Why not just:

To make the mhx importer work, one must therefore allow Blender to automatically run python scripts. The setting is found in the File tab of the User Preferences window.

Just like how previous versions of blender handled scripts by default.

For more info on the change in security see http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Extensions/Python/Security

Yeah, I read that. If you could read my post, in turn, that’d be great.

Basically I was saying that this just kind of puts another barrier between the two programs (and, apparently, compromises security, too) and so I just wanted to make light of it, to maybe spark somebody to think of a work-around, and just generally let the Blender community know how great MakeHuman is and so hopefully there won’t be further incongruencies between them.

But from a user standpoint, yeah, this one problem is not a huge deal at all, I agree.

I didn’t mean to be too glib, and I know that this is hardly a huge issue. But I just hope to encourage continued compatibility between these two programs that I really love.