MB-Lab Release for Blender 2.80

[animate1978]

Have not updated in some time here but I want to provide some info on what’s going on and reply to some of the requested features here.

Regarding the shape keys at it’s current state. It is too early to say, right now, if the shape keys can match the Facecap app BUT (and this ties in to further down the post) that is not to say it can’t be done. We just have to figure out how.

The release cycle for the next version has been pushed back for a bit because of some new very interesting developments in the future. The idea is to create a new part of MB-Lab for developing a new character. I know this has been attempted before by myself however the tools I was using were at a very rough basic state. We have a new developer on board who has been very busy building this and has developed a rough idea of what is to come.

What you are seeing here is a new Tab for MB-Lab, currently titled MB-Crea (we are still working on a “name”). This tab is meant for creating a character for MB-Lab from scratch. I am using that Toon Girl model as an example.
Right now only Morph Creation tools work, which is a HUGE deal because the morphs are what make the characters customizable, the individual min and max morphs for things such as the size and shape of the arms, legs and so on. The code was derived from the same code I used for the early character build testing, it is just more refined.

There is also a somewhat functional project creation tool. Basically it’s a mechanism to create a “project” where all files created later to have a compatible model for the engine will be saved. Dedicated directories and so on. And a file for all information about this project can be saved / loaded. These are the directories in the “data” folder. I tried it out and unfortunately created directories that where very restrictive and could not view contents so it needs some work, it is a start.

I had planned for UDIM however because I am not sure how it’s going to be done, it has not been completed at this time. I am sure it’s going to be a combination of code and shader nodes I just can’t seem to figure it out just right yet.

Working on it though.

Small code change for the lighting, instead of appending a light object saved in the humanoid_library blend file… the code will now create the lights via Python. It’s something that should have been done a long time ago, just never got around to it. Now it’s in there. It doesn’t shave much space from the blend but it does make the file exclusive to mesh and armatures.

I am not sure when 1.7.8 will be released, ever since the start of the MB-Crea tab tools the “normal” release cycle was 2-3 months per version, at least that was the trend. With these new features I want to push it back to make something special and worthy. I think in the end it would be worth the wait.

I’ll provide more updates soon, sorry it has been so long things have been kind of hectic in my personal life (short story I am moving to a new house)…

[Geep]

This looks really cool and a great time saver!

[Safetyman]

Thanks for the update. Really looking forward to what’s coming.

[polygonesrus]

how can I adjust the sss in the caucasion skin shader , cant seam to figure it out .

[SopitaFria]

just Caucasian? I am not sure of your problem but to change the sss in general you can open the skin node and there is the sss node that you can also open to modify its values, to open the nodes there is a symbol at the top right next to it of the name of the node, sorry if I said something meaningless, I’m using a translator

[animate1978]

The current shader does not have a slider for SSS in MB-Lab, it will though in the upcoming version because this is not the first request for that feature again. I had taken it out thinking it wouldn’t really be used anymore but that was wrong. I am not sure why I assumed that logic.

I apologize.

[StanCobalt (Jake)]

I’m gonna preface my in-need-of-help questions with, I’m new to both blender, this add-on, and the fact that I’m stupid. With that out of the way, with exporting it using the Better-Collada exporter to export to Godot, or the default .DAE exporter, I’m hit with this error. Using a different format that Godot can read does export, but Godot gets an error then also.

With that said, I have not touched anything other than changing it’s physical features, so I might be missing the basic internal step to get it to export properly, but as I said, I’m not that smart. Is it possible to export it as a .DAE file and I’m just missing that basic step, or it’s just not gonna work out.

[polygonesrus]

ok , thanks for the reply , looking forward to the next release . great work keeping this going , love this add-on

[Daedalus_MDW]

looks like the dae exporter is bugged. be sure you are using the 2.8 version of the addon.

did you try exporting a simple object?

else, use a different exporter.

[StanCobalt (Jake)]

Ya know what, I should have tried exporting a singular object that had nothing to deal with MB lab, and now I feel stupid because it is indeed the Better Collada exporter/blender.

[animate1978]

Don’t feel stupid.

It’s a learning process and sometimes it’s confusing

[Marija_Gajski]

If I understand correct could MB-Crea allow children to come ?

[animate1978]

The code that Teto is developing would allow for users and developers to build their own characters, so I suppose it would not be impossible.

It’s name will be changed, the MB-Crea sounds weird. Something like MB-Dev or MB-Gen.

Either way the development of new characters is very much a WIP and not complete at all. The tools built so far allow the creation and editing of Morphs and Expressions, that is all that has been built right now. There needs to be more before we can consider merging to the master branch and releasing to the public.

[LostInBlender]

Hello everyone, I am very new here. I have Blender 2.81 installed and I have downloaded the MB-Lab 1.7.7 and the Rigify-for-MB-Lab. I press Add Meta Rig, then Generate Rig and I get the following warning.

File “C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\blender-2.81a-windows64\2.81\scripts\addons\Rigify-for-MB-Lab-master\generate_rig.py”, line 439, in execute
rigify_rig.data.edit_bones[name].head.x = m[0]
KeyError: ‘bpy_prop_collection[key]: key “thigh_L_ik_target” not found’

Still then I press Rename to Def *. I select the rig and in the Modifiers tab, I change the Object for this Rig. I select it and move to Pose Mode, but the rig moves and the body does not. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

[animate1978]

I will look into this, I am not exactly sure what the problem could be at the moment though.

[hopefullyidont1 (Hope)]

MB-Lab with the new Morph creator, work is being done to create new base mesh to allow licensing for game engine use, which was previously a roadblock.
the new mesh has more materials however it will allow more detail without needing to use udim.

[animate1978]

Quite a bit of time has passed since I have been here to update the on goings with MB-Lab.

Found out within the last 24 hours that a script that one of our developers, Noizirom, had written some time ago is just not working right. This script is NOT part of MB-Lab and it was supposed to write out the JSON files for the polygons, vertices and weights that MB-Lab uses for it’s internal workings.

For the longest time there have been issues in the results.

The below is an example, the weights were painted for the head, written out to JSON and then using a development version of MB-Lab I created the “Toon Girl” prototype testing model and then checked out it’s weights.

Above is the base mesh with the weights painted on everything except the eyeballs.

This is the MB-Lab result.

As you can see the “head” weights are inconsistent and they have been written to the arms as well.

The result will smear the mesh. The above was using Cycles just because I wanted to see what it would look like.

As an example of what the weights are supposed to look like…

This was brought up to Noizirom who also had experienced the same issue. So a new script will be worked on but for now until that is done any work related to “new mesh” will have to be placed on hold.

In other news.
The MB-Dev framework code is coming along nicely. Slowly but Teto is essentially reverse engineering this addon but so far we are able to edit the Expressions, the individual body part morphs and the main transformation morph (this is the Age/Mass/Tone morph).

GUI changes

Instead of taking up even MORE space for this addon it was decided to change the GUI a bit. The cool thing about this code is that you can move the MB-Lab or MB-Dev tabs up or down depending on your preference.

There are now highlighted sliders… so you can visually see what is being changed rather than just numerical values.

That is all for now, with everything in the world going on and being that this is a MASSIVE update to MB-Lab, please allow us some more time to get the next release ready. I say we are about half done so far, the development cycle for this version is going to take a lot longer than previous versions but I believe it would be worth it in the end.

[Safetyman]

Thanks for the update. Can’t wait to see the next version, but take your time.

[Momchilo]

Dude, thanks so much for working on this!

[Dango]

Hi guys, I plan to make a game with character creation and I was wondering if there were any way to extract body morph targets too (and maybe age, skin tone etc…). Thanks a lot I love your work !