Hi and welcome to this introduction to MPFB2. MPFB2 is a free and open source human generator,
implemented as an add-on for blender. With MPFB2 you can model human characters,
rig and pose them, equip assets such as clothes. save and load character presets and set up
sculpt projects. If you have not encountered MPFB2 before,
I encourage you to follow the links in the description of this video and read some of
the FAQ items. These will provide some
context information that will hopefully prevent some of the most common misunderstandings. At the point of making this video, the second
alpha of MPFB2 has been released, and the third is on the way. As MPFB2 is still in an alpha stage, things
change a bit in the UI. Hopefully, things should be recognizable enough
to follow if you look at this video at a later point in time. In this tutorial, I will cover most of the
basics needed to get up to speed with using MPFB2. For several of the topics covered, there are
more in-depth videos specifically for those. What is covered in this particular video are
only the basics. Once you have started
using MPFB2, you will find that there is plenty more to discover. We will begin with installing MPFB2 and the
assets it needs, take a look at modeling and posing, discuss assets and
materials, find out how to save and load characters, introduce basic sculpting
operations and cover how you can migrate existing MakeHuman projects to
MPFB2. Finally, we'll take a look at some ways to
get help if you get stuck or when you encounter a bug. But let's start with the installation. The first thing you need is a modern installation
of Blender. Blender as such will
not be covered in this video. I will assume that you know your way around
it reasonably, at least enough to start it and perform some
basic operations. Then you need the MPFB2 add-on, obviously. Finally, in order to have the basic assets
available you will also need at least the system
asset pack. From the home page you can find the link to
the tuxfamily directory where the add-on lives. It is important to note that what you want
is always the latest nightly build. At this
point in the development, that is where all the recent bug fixes will be. While it is
possible to download something called a release, there is in practise no difference between
a nightly build and a release. A release is just a nightly build that was
renamed at a point in time. Then you need the system asset pack. This can be found under assets on the homepage. The system asset pack contains all the basic
shapes and materials, thing such as eyeballs and standard skins. In Blender you can now go to edit and preferences
and addons. Here you can click the install button and
find the MPFB2 zip you downloaded. When having selected the zip, it is normal
that it might take several seconds for the blender
UI to react. Enable the addon and save the preferences. You should now have a MPFB2 toolshelf. Here you can find the apply assets and library
settings panel. This will include a load pack from
zip button. Click this and find the zip file you downloaded. Again it might take a few seconds
for the UI to react. Now we need to restart blender for the changes
to take effect. Before continuing, let's say a few more words
about asset packs. On the asset packs page you can find several
other packs apart from the system asset pack. In order to get the most out of MPFB2, you
will most likely want to download several if not
all of these. The asset packs contain assets such as clothes
contributed from community members. You can install these using the same install
button as you used when installing the system asset pack. Remember to restart blender after having installed
new asset packs. Anyway, we should now have a functional MPFB2
installation and can start with some real modeling. The first thing to do is to create a new human
from scratch. Here you can find some basic parameters you
can use to set a rough outline of how you want the
character to look. These settings are just a start and can all
be changed later on, so just choose approximately what you want here. Once having created the character, you can
fine-tune the settings you entered on the first
panel. To do so, select the character and find the
model panel and the phenotype sub panel. If you are used to MakeHuman lingo, the phenotype
is what would be called macro details in MakeHuman. Before continuing with modeling finer details,
we will want to set a skin so we can better see
what the end result might look like. Back in the modeling panel, let's tweak some
facial details. There are quite a lot of these settings, and
I will not be covering them all. My suggestion
is to simply play around with the settings and see what happens. With a basic character shape in place, we
will be interested in seeing it posable. There is a point in adding a rig early, preferrably
before adding any clothes or body parts. This
is because if the rig is present when we add the assets, then these will be automatically
rigged. Adding a rig afterwards is somewhat cumbersome. On the rigging and add rig panel you can find
options for what kind of rig to add. There are a few ways to go here, depending
on what your end goal is. For example, if you intend
to export your character to Unity, you will want to use the game engine rig. Or if you are
comfortable with rigify since before, then you might want to go the rigify route. For this tutorial we will use the default
standard rig, since it comes with a few helpers that
might make life easier. So we click the add standard rig. Here we could simply go to pose mode and move
the rig around. But we can get more utility than a plain FK
rig. So we go to the rig helpers panel and add
helpers. I will here enter wireframe mode a bit, in
order to not get banned from youtube. As you can see, you have now have access to
IK bones for easily moving stuff around. There are several options for what kind of
helpers you might want, but it is out of scope for
this video to describe these. Again, I encourage you to play around with
the settings to see what happens. Now that we have a rig in place, it is time
to equip body parts and clothes. Note that at this point I have installed some
extra asset packs, namely the dress01 and system materials packs. We will start with adding eyes. We'll get back to changing the eye color later
on. Then we need eyebrows. And eyelashes. Hair is usually a good idea. If you have installed the system materials
pack, it is now also possible to change the hair
color. We'll select a reddish hair color here. In order to be able to show the character
in full view, we will need some clothes. We'll select
a dress by Margaret Toigo, who by the way have contributed quite a lot of the assets
that are shared under CC0. We might as well add some shoes too. Now this is starting to look like a viable
character. Many aspects of the materials in MPFB2 are
procedural, and can thus be tweaked from within the UI without having to draw a new diffuse
texture. We will start with the eyes. First, select the eyes. These are called "high poly" here in
the list, but could also have been selected in the viewport. Material settings can be changed in the materials
section in the properties panel. Let's change the color to a greenish tint. The skin, too, can be tweaked. Maybe we want a somewhat paler hue. And possibly we want somewhat darker red lips. There are many other aspects of the eyes and
skin materials, and I will not cover them here. Again, just play around with the settings
and you should be able to interactively see what
happens in the viewport. The final aspect of materials needs the shading
editor. Maybe we want to override the
color of the dress, but still keep the transparent parts. We can then change the
strength of the diffuse texture to zero and choose a different color. Now that we have a character we're satisfied
with, we want to save it as a preset in order to be
able to quickly load it in new scenes. Save files are called presets in MPFB2 and
can be managed on the manage presets panel. As you can see it is possible to manage human,
skin and eye presets separately. We will store the human as a preset here. This will store information about the body
shape, the selected rig, equipped assets and material
settings in a JSON file in your configuration directory. Now we can delete the character and later
recreate it from the new human panel. Before continuing I'll just mention what is
not saved in a preset. A preset is just a list
of modeling parameters, assets and material settings. It is not a blend file, and it does
not store the actual mesh. Thus, if you make changes to the actual mesh,
for example by moving or deleting vertices, then these changes
will not be stored. Further, poses and rig
helper settings are not stored either. If you want actual changes to the mesh to
be saved, then you will have to save the blend file instead of using a character preset. Another area you might be interested in is
sculpting. While MPFB does not implement any
sculpting functionality in itself, it will help you with a good starting point. There are many different potential goals with
sculpting, such as making a detailed 3d mesh or creating a normal map. For the latter part, there is already an in-depth
video on creating normal maps in the makehuman channel on youtube,
so let's focus on setting up for sculpting 3d features. As a potential case: let's say we want to
sculpt a muscular bowman standing in a classic bowman stance. We want more details than what can be achieved
with only using MPFB modeling sliders. We start with creating roughly the shape that
we want to work with. Then we add a rig and put the character in
the pose we indend the final sculpt to be. At this point we're happy with the start and
want to proceed to the actual sculpting. So we select the base mesh and find the operations
and set up for sculpt panel. Now this might look somewhat intimidating,
but most of these settings can just be left as is. The overall goal is to prepare the character
mesh for sculpting and removing obstacles that
might get in the way. The most important setting is the strategy. Roughly speaking the two first options are
for when you want to bake a normal map. In that case you would not want to change
the mesh you already have. Rather you would want to prepare a copy to
perform the sculpt on. In this case though, we're perfectly happy
with setting up a sculpt on the mesh we already have, so we select the origin strategy. The next decision you will want to make is
what kind of resolution strategy you want. To
simplify a lot: if you want to be able to use existing MPFB skins, accept the default
and set up a multires modifier. In the majority of cases this is what you
want. The alternative would be to not set up a multires
modifier and instead go for dyntopo. If you
indend to do radical topological change to the mesh, such as adding extra arms or wings,
then untick this checkbox. The next setting is how high resolution you
want. This can be increased later on, and three
levels of subdivision is a sensible choice. If you are low on computer power, you might
want to settle for two. The rest of the options can safely be left
at their defaults. Only change these if you intend
to do the corresponding operation manually before entering sculpt mode. So now we're set and can enable sculpting. It will take a few seconds to finish. Now, this isn't a tutorial on sculpting. But at this point just go at it as you would
normally do when sculpting. Again: if you want a more in-depth tutorial
or are interested in baking normal maps, see the separate video in the
channel. The next part of the tutorial concerns MakeHuman
and how to migrate MakeHuman projects to MPFB. If you have never heard about MakeHuman or
do not intend to use it, you can safely skip ahead
a bit. First a few words about the relation between
MakeHuman and MPFB, in order to hopefully avoid
some confusion. It is important to note that MakeHuman and
MPFB are two different projects with separate codebases. MPFB2 is not version two of MakeHuman, it
is version two of MPFB. Whereas MakeHuman is a standalone application
which has been around for some fifteen years or more, MPFB is a blender addon which only
recently saw the light of day. This said: MPFB uses the same asset formats
as MakeHuman, making it completely forwards compatible. You can open a Makehuman model in MPFB, and
you can use the same clothes files in MakeHuman and MPFB. All in all, MakeHuman can be thought of as
MPFB's now somewhat quirky old grandfather, sitting
in his rocking chair complaining that the youth these days prefers being blender addons
instead of being standalone applications as in the
good old days. Anyway, as said it is possible to reuse MakeHuman
models in MPFB. I will here demonstrate two
different approaches. So, let's first create a character in MakeHuman. Then we make sure that the socket server is
enabled. In MPFB we can now go to the new human from
MakeHuman panel and import it "online". What you
get here is what you see in the MakeHuman viewport. Note that it is normal for this process
to take some time, so don't be surprised it it looks as if blender freezes for a few seconds. While this is convenient, it is important
to note that what you get here are baked meshes. You
cannot continue modeling a character in MPFB after having imported it this way. Or at least,
you will run into some rather random phenomena if you try to. The other way is to instead import MakeHuman
save files. So we save the MakeHuman character
and note the file name. Then in MPFB we go to new human from presets
and import the MHM file. Doing this creates a character which is functionally
equivalent of having created it from scratch in MPFB. The final part of the MakeHuman section is
the preferences. If you want, you can tell MPFB
to autodiscover the MakeHuman data directory, or explicitly say where it is. This way, MPFB
will also find any assets which MakeHuman knows about. If you don't have any assets which
only exists in MakeHuman, you might want to avoid this though. Enabling it will most likely
clutter your asset library panels with duplicates of many assets. As a last part of this tutorial, I'll just
mention some ways to get help and report bugs. Within the UI, you will find direct links
to some web resources. Clicking on these buttons
should open a web browser and navigate to the appropriate location. Before reporting a bug, it will be helpful
if you first update to the latest nightly build
to see if the problem is already solved, and that you read the FAQ item about what
information to include in a bug report. Anyway, this concludes the tutorial. Thank you for watching, and happy modeling.
