During the past year I have been involved in the MakeHuman project, and have worked on some tools for facilitating the use of MakeHuman characters in film-making with Blender:
MHX export from MakeHuman
MHX import into Blender
Mocap tool
Lipsync tool
The book describes these tools in the context of making a short movie. To make the text self-contained, there is also a discussion of some parts of Blender, like file linking and video sequencing, that are not so well known but essential for film-making.
I also wanted to show that it is possible to use MHX export and the mocap tool to make an animated short very quickly. Despite various flaws with animation and shadows, I think that this point has been proven.
By the way I am curious because I don’t want to download and sift through all of that stuff. What exactly was the mocap tool all about? There are some major problems with how that mocap data was processed and I want to know what method you used to clean it up and how you handled the rigging. Looks like you had problems in both areas and I can give you some pointers that would get you dialed in closer next time if you are interested.
I just found makehuman a couple of days ago and downloaded it. It was fun playing with it! I myself got an error during import using the “mocap import add-on” so I wound up importing the motion capture bvh file directly from the blender menu. Got the bones placed but I still don’t understand how to parent the skin to the bones so that the movement of the bones effect the skin. It definitely would be nice to have it connect to the armature quickly.
There are all kinds of tutorials out there for Blender on rigging.
basically once you fit the bones to the character and a combination of both fitting the character to bones (rotate arms or legs into position) simply select the Character then the Armature Ctl P for parent and chose “Automatic Weights”. That will get you started. From there you’ll have to do some tweaking. Google it for some tuts.
In two weeks, eh?
I don’t even know how is it appropriate to critic this.
The animation is pretty darn terrible, but since it was done in only two weeks, i don’t know what to say…
