MakeHuman

[Tommi Laukkanen]

After studying MakeHuman it looks to me that it would be a perfect
solution if we could import MakeHuman characters directly to
OpenSimulator and new breed of viewers. MakeHuman seems to have all
required tricks for making high quality avatar customization and
animation. It has been around for a long time and been successfully
developing their model further.

-tommi

[Tommi Laukkanen]

Forgot the link:

http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php

[Dahlia Trimble]

a few comments...

Makehuman is an interesting concept, but I think the models are quite high poly count and would be very expensive to render and animate, and may not be suitable for virtual world viewers for a few years, or until there is an advancement in commonplace graphics processor capabilities. Of course if you want to rig one and try animating it in real time, I don't want to discourage you :)

Also, OpenSimulator (currently) does not specify, store, or distribute any avatars, with the exception of appearance parameters. Avatars are completely implemented on the viewers which work with OpenSimulator. Perhaps you're referring to a Realxtend implementation?

[Tommi Laukkanen]

I am talking about future opensimulator :). I dont see LL compliance
as a must for all viewers and modules. Rex is a good example though.
MakeHuman did not seem that high poly count to me. It is rigged in the
MakeHuman UI so it should be possible to transfer that rigging
directly. As it is open source project they might even give us some
support on the excercise. On the long run MakeHuman could be official
character studio for OpenSimulator or metaverse in general...

MakeHuman also works based on single model which is parametrized
similary as secondlife avatar. It is a good question whether we should
just implement the secondlife avatar to IdealistViewer instead of
MakeHuman avatar?

-tommi

[Dahlia Trimble]

Idealist does not have an official avatar but I believe there may be a rigged SL avatar included in the distribution somewhere. Currently the goals for OpenSimulator is to be a generic virtual world platform and as such there may be a lot of resistance to attempting to define a "standard" avatar from the user community, though I imagine there may be people who wish to use it with other avatars than the SL ones. Avatars are really a choice for a particular application/implementation and Idealist can currently use any avatar which can be used by the Irrlicht engine, which may include the makehuman one if you can export it in a compatible format and Irrlicht will work with it. I imagine some users would like to use makehuman in Idealist/Opensim for certain applications. Note that the makehuman avatar includes multiple high definition mesh layers as well as some internal anatomy, which is a lot of overhead. If you compare the vertex count for a makehuman avatar to that of Sydney or the SL avatar, I think you may be surprised. But then again, since Idealist can handle any animated mesh that Irrlicht can handle, if the makehuman avie works in Irrlicht it should work in Idealist. Irrlicht is limited in mesh complexity due to the use of 16 bit vertex indices, which is why the mesh terrain had to be split up into multiple segments. However if you get it to work, it adds another option for Idealist users. 

Personally I prefer to use my own custom avatars in Idealist. Currently I'm using a dachshund puppy when I'm not using Sydney, and people using the SL viewer see me as my normal SL avatar.

Note also that makehuman is GPL so it really can't be distributed with OpenSim or Idealist under the BSD license.