I have a question about exporting from Blender. Basically I’m using Makehuman to make a character. I have it working to an extent, but I had a Z-buffer issue when scaling down in that the armature would poke through clothes causing the textures to tear. The makehuman guys suggested I set hide faces covered by materials (i.e. don’t show geometry under clothes) to fix it.
The thing is when I try pview and set the light on, the textures all disappear and the model remains (i.e there is no model where the clothes are). So I assume that will be the same in Panda itself? I’d like it to show the textures and model correctly when lit basically, in pview that’s not happening, I can only have one or the other at the moment.
This looks like an issue that someone else reported with regards to exporting models created in MakeHuman.
If I’m not much mistaken, the issue in that case was that the materials had transparency assigned: in a “Properties” panel, go to the “Material” tab. For each material, scroll down to “Transparency” and make sure that the value of “Alpha” is 1 and that “Transparency” is disabled. (I’m honestly not sure that the “Transparency” check is used; the important thing is that the “Alpha” value is 1, regardless of the state of the “Transparency” check-box, I believe.)
Thanks. I can’t find those options in Makehuman or Blender, but I can’t usually find anything in Blender so I’m guessing I can do it in there somewhere.
Ah, sorry, I should perhaps have mentioned that the setting that I described was in Blender. (There may be some corresponding setting in MAkeHuman, but since I don’t use it I’m not in a position to give much further help there.)
In Blender, first select your object.
Next, go to the “Properties” view. This should be the view in which you add materials, alter object properties, etc. I have it on the right-hand side of the Blender window in my workspace setup. If you don’t see it, you should be able to simply call it up in any panel (such as your 3D view): in one of the left corners of the panel (either top or bottom), you should have a rectangular button, containing an icon and two triangles one on top of the other, pointing up and down respectively. Clicking on this should produce a list with the label “Editor type:”. In this list, look for and click on “Properties”.
At the top of the “Properties” view, you should see a horizontal list of icons; one of these should have the tooltip “Material”–click on this.
You should see a list-box containing your materials. For each one, click on its name, then scroll down in the “Properties” view until you reach a section labelled “Transparency”. Make sure that the check-box for this is unchecked, and that the value of “Alpha” is 1.
Thanks, that really helped. Half the problem was my properties panel was squished up so I couldn’t see the material icon when it appeared. Anyway, this is what I got on the static model by taking off transparency and adding alpha as 1.0:
I think I might have to re-apply my BVH before I have set the textures correctly rather than afterwards which I did here (since it was already set up) What do you reckon? That’s based on assuming that the animated frames are somehow based on the original material settings or something? I’ve no idea.
Ok, I’ve made sort-of progress. I’ve got the lighting sorted thanks to your advice, but again I have the weird Z-buffer issue with the feet and the texture tearing. So I’ll need to fiddle around with it a bit. Below is a cap of him running with aplha set to 1 and transparency off on all textures.
Not sure, but I think that in this case issue is not in Z-buffer. It’s looks like problems with vertex weights or with different weight calculation accuracy in Blender and Panda.
b.t.w., in my opinion it’s bad practice to “clothe” model by this way (clothes mesh over body) - it waste performance. Usually for this purposes use replacing parts of the model.
Yeah, there’s an option in Makehuman that is set by default not to show faces under clothing. I had that working at one point (see original screen cap at the top of the thread) but can’t seem to get it to work most of the time. So I don’t know if I exported that differently or what, I’m a bit baffled by it. I guess I can manually remove the geometry in Blender. I don’t want the geometry there in the first place and I guess that would solve the problem.
I did a bit of an experiment where I added a skin texture in makehuman. If I make that transparent then the feet look really good since the texture covers the whole body. The trouble is it looks like the invisible man without a head or arms.
Ok, I think I know what’s going on now. Makehuman uses mask modifiers to hide the geometry under clothes. But I can never get modifiers to work with yabee. I always get the attached error. I don’t know if anyone else is using that successfully? Anyway, sometimes I can get it to work but I might give in and try MHX2 which removes the geometry.
Actually, even if you use “invisible” texture, then it does not solve problem with performance because Panda still need to animate all vertices, that is rather slow.
Ok. In both case problem is similar. In Blender you not see same behaviour as on the first screen because polygons under the clothes is hiden with “mask” modifier, to remove this polygons in the *.egg file you should apply this modifiers by hand, or use “apply modifiers” check box. Well, but YABEE crashed when you trying to use “apply modifiers” checkbox. I fixed this problem in the last commit and you can download latest version from git, or if you wish to use old version - you should remove “SubSurf” modifier, which cause crash when YABEE trying to apply it.
Thanks for that. I installed yabee from github but I still get the export problem with modifiers. maybe the upgrade didn’t take, I’ll check it. But if I removed the subsurf modifier and then export with modifiers checked it works, so I’m happy with that. Thanks a lot.
