"alphaQuad" <alp### [at] earthlinknet> wrote in message 
news:web.491bceca607813b365e6af150@news.povray.org...
> Warning!
> MakeHuman
> Creepiest hermaphrodite screencaps, avoid at all cost if you want to keep 
> your
> dreams untainted.
>
> hurl yucky pooh pooh
>

** Warning. This response may contain elements of sarcasm. **

Thanks for the carefully thought out and eloquently phrased review. It must 
have been hard to conduct such a thorough evaluation of last years MakeHuman 
release candidate in the few hours that you've spent on it, especially given 
the time you've evidently invested in crafting your 5 newsgroup responses.

In response to some of the diverse points you've raised:

> amazing that they cant' put the target OS on a download
> page at sourceforge it doesnt run, of course

I see you've already found the answers to most of these points yourself, but 
just to summarise; There are prebuilt installers for the year old release 
candidate as listed on the download page at 
http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php?post=s1210866244 for various Windows 
Operating Systems, for Mac OSX and for Mandriva (whatever that is). The 
version currently under development is, as yet, only available as source 
code on SourceForge, but is being written to run across multiple platforms 
and will have prebuilt installers for Mac OSX, Linux and Windows. I believe 
the main developer uses Ubuntu, but I was able to build myself a version on 
Windows without much difficulty. The version under development doesn't 
actually do very much when you get it running, but it does permit you to 
experiment with the Python scripting, so I was able to write and test the 
POV-Ray export function with it.

> wish they had spent less time on pdf files and more time
> on a text called instructions or readme to put in the release!

I too had difficulty following their original documentation. My response was 
a little different though, I offered to assist with the documentation of 
their new release candidate (still! each to his own). I've therefore been 
assisting with the documentation on the new Wiki at 
http://makehuman.wiki.sourceforge.net/. Community feedback on the new 
documentation would be welcomed as it's something we can collectively 
actually do something about.

> makeHuman export as obj -> poseray -> povray

Ah! I see you found the old .OBJ export route required by the year old 
release candidate and that you didn't like it very much. I didn't like that 
very much either. Once again our approaches differ here slightly. I wrote a 
direct POV-Ray export for the software currently under development and 
submitted it for approval to the project team, getting it incorporated into 
the application. I'm suprised you didn't see the page describing that as I 
linked to it in my original response to Mike the Elders question.

> Creepiest hermaphrodite screencaps, avoid at all
> cost if you want to keep your dreams untainted.

You raise two points here; As explained in the technical paper on the new 
Wiki, the base model is a neutral model to which a very large number of 
gender, ethnicity, age etc. variants can be applied using controls provided 
by the MakeHuman application. I assume you wouldn't have read that though as 
your busy schedule clearly didn't leave you any spare time for such things. 
The year old release candidate also enables you to tailor all of the 
features to create the model of your dreams, whether those dreams are 
tainted or not, but I'm guessing from your notes that you didn't have time 
to explore any functionality or anything trivial like that.  Note though 
that the new GUI will change the way such character tailoring is performed.

Anyhoo. Thanks for the valuable time you've spent in your highly articulate 
review and the words of encouragement that I'm sure will encourage the 
MakeHuman team. After all it's words like yours that stimulate people to 
provide their time for free to solve the many complex problems that have 
been outstanding for so many years to bring free humanoid modelling to the 
open source 3D graphics community.

** End of sarcasm warning. **

Regards,
Chris B.

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