So “officially” this morning I merged the development branch of MB-Lab 1.7.8 into ‘master’
Which means that 1.7.8 has been released to the public. It would have been done yesterday as planned BUT had slight issue with the Realistic Human Male characters that lost the skin shader (somehow) which caused MB-Lab to crash.
With this release it adds the ability to build your own character for MB-Lab, but be warned that it is not an easy process and the documentation is still being worked on to make it easier to understand how to do this. It involves many steps, and patience and understand that the MB-Dev tools (as they are called…) MAY CONTAIN UNFORESEEN BUGS!
On that note here is a list of updates for this version.
Added
MB-Dev Character Development Framework introduced
Hair Engine now adds hair shaders to Cycles and EEVEE
Changed
MBLabSkin2 uses Principled BSDF yet again
Removed SSS scale group, replaced with Vector Math node
Bump map added, Thickness map removed
Modified skin oil maps
Eyelash shader now has bump and gloss
ExpressionEngine class now in it's own file
Blush map converted to grayscale
Modified Albedo maps
Bump maps now 4k resolution
Modified Freckle masks
Modified Material Engine
Changed lighting code
MB-Lab has new version numbering scheme. Last number for dev purposes
Sliders are now highlighted
GUI update
MBLab Pupil use Diffuse Node instead of Emission
SSS Radius changed to more accurate values
Freckles now include two colors
Bug Fixes
Poses don't show when user selects IK model
Preserve Phenotype random function code fix
Typo: Hands_Lenght, fixed in transformation and measurements JSON
Typo: Various names in transformation files fixed
Hair Dynamics bug fix for Nvidia GPU cards
Known Issues
MB-Dev tools may contain bugs that are unknown at this time
This version is available for download : https://mblab.dev/
You can also clone this repository at : https://github.com/animate1978/MB-Lab
Again I cannot stress this enough… the MB-Dev tools have been tested at a basic level and may contain bugs, the process for building your own characters for MB-Lab can be tricky but we are working on the docs to help make it clear. We as developers have only just begun to work on new characters for MB-Lab but no official new ones are in the library just yet. So please understand that if MB-Lab does crash or not behave properly to submit your bug reports on GitHub. One of the key developers for the MB-Dev tools is on extended leave for personal reasons so any bugs that do pop up may not be resolved immediately, remember that MB-Lab 1.7.7 was released LAST YEAR so future updates may take a while again. We are trying to make this tools as user friendly as possible but updates in the future may take some time, however we are working on this project actively.
Thank you all for your input, use and interest in MB-Lab, this project would have died off a long time ago without your continued support!