"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message 
news:web.49b02838fea29af834d207310@news.povray.org...
> Okay, after some more tweaking, I've got two questions:
>
> i) Is all the functionality there right now for making hair?  The only 
> code I
> see seems to want a "hair.inc" and I don't see anywhere that gets created.

No. The code for generating the mesh2 object from which the hairs will be 
grown is already there (the MakeHuman_Hairline group defined at the bottom 
of the makehuman_groupings.inc file). One of the examples in the generated 
scene file is designed to use an external hair generation include file 
"hair.inc" to grow hairs out of the object, but that isn't yet ready. When I 
have a version running properly my plan is to load this onto the Object 
Collection rather than distribute it with MakeHuman. The example in the 
generated scene file currently detects the absence of this file and just 
reports that in the message stream.


> ii) How are the eyes controlled?  In a few of my various renderings, I see 
> eyes,
> but haven't figured out how to actually make them appear.

The eyes are part of the texture map 'texture.tif'. They should appear 
wherever the standard texture is used (e.g. Examples 0 and 1 in the 
generated scene file). You can't currently do much to 'control' them unless 
you want to edit a copy of the texture map in a graphics editor. In the full 
function release I would expect that you'll be able to pose the eyes in 
MakeHuman (hopefully in May according to the current plan).


> iii) What will be the eventual use of all the joint variables?  I've made 
> up
> characters in povray before where I was able to animate them based on a 
> given
> set of joints-- I could share a youtube link if it's not overly obvious 
> what I
> mean.  Are you looking to have either a boned mesh whose bones are 
> "animatable"
> in povray, or a group of objects (thigh object, etc.) that are animatable?

The general answer is that I've attempted to structure this export to give 
POV-Ray users access to data that we can use in any way we want. The current 
use that I've put these particular variables to is to evaluate the position 
and orientation of body parts (initially to create the hairline object). 
They can also be used for positioning and orienting other POV-Ray props 
(clothing, walking sticks, glasses, car seats etc) relative to the generated 
human figure. It will be interesting to see how people use this data.

It should be possible to use this data to pose/animate other figures as you 
describe once the pose functionality of MakeHuman is available.  FYI, there 
is already code in the MakeHuman application (though not yet exposed through 
the GUI) to generate BVH files that could be used for rigging other forms of 
character in a variety of other modelling tools.  I have seen animation 
features on the list of things that the MakeHuman Team is planning to 
implement, though I'm not sure when we can expect this to be ready.

Regards,
Chris B.

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