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About

This addon is an extension of the SMPL-X Blender addon created by Joachim Tesch and owned by the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Meshcapade has licensed the SMPL model and its updates (including SMPL-H, SMPL-X, STAR and SUPR) from Max Planck Institute, and is making this extension of the blender add-on available for all users who either have an active license for the SMPL Model (academic or commercial), or are users of Meshcapade’s 3D avatar platform meshcapade.me.

This add-on allows you to edit, reshape and animate SMPL-H, SMPL-X, and SUPR bodies ("SMPL Bodies" for short) to your current Blender scene. Each body consists of a mesh, a shape specific skeleton, and blendshapes (also known as "shape keys") for body shape, facial expressions and pose correctives.

Using the add-on with meshcapade.me platform

If you have a file created on the meshcapade.me platform, you can use this blender add-on for updating the pose-correctives of your downloaded files.

Here is a short video showing how to use this add-on with files downloaded from the meshcapade.me platform: https://youtu.be/bqi_n-7dR5U?feature=shared

Using the add-on with a SMPL Model License

The plugin as it exists here is free for all uses. However, there are certain features that require an additional data folder which you get as part of being a licensed user of the SMPL Model. Academic licenses are free. More information about academic, commercial and R&D licenses can be found on our website or by contacting sales@meshcapade.com.

Features

Overview

  • Add female/male/neutral bodies for the SMPL-H/SMPL-X/SUPR model to current scene2
  • Set sample materials
  • Load avatar (body shape and motion) from .npz file2
  • Set body shape from height and weight measurements1, 2
  • Randomize/reset body shape1, 2
  • Randomize/reset face shape1, 2
  • Randomize/reset facial expression 1, 2
  • Position body so that the feet are on the ground plane
  • Enable/disable pose corrective blendshapes for a single frame or for multiple frames
  • Change hand pose (flat, relaxed)2
  • Write current pose in Rodrigues vector notation to console or to a .json file
  • Modify and read the metadata for SMPL Body files
  • Set the blendshape range of all shape keys to -10 and 10, to bypass a current bug in Blender when importing .fbx files with shape keys on them

1not SMPL-H
2licensed users only

Installation

  • Download or pull the plugin from github.

  • Licensed Users - setup the data folder.

    • Download the zipped data folder.
    • Unzip the data folder and place it inside the 'meshcapade/meshcapade_addon' folder.

  • Place the Blender addon inside your Blender folder's addon folder here:

    • Windows: [drive]:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender [version]\[version]\scripts\addons\
    • Linux: /usr/share/blender/[version]/scripts/addons/
    • Mac:

      • Go to Applications > Blender then right click on blender and select Show Package Contents image

      • Then navigate to contents > resources > [version] > scripts > addons and place the meshcapade addon inside the addons folder

  • Inside Blender, go to Edit > Preferences, and select Add-ons from the left bar

  • Search for Meshcapade in the search bar on the top right

  • If you don't see the plugin, hit refresh in the top right corner. If you still don't see it, try restarting Blender.

  • If the plugin is not enabled, check the box next to the plugin name to enable it image

  • To open the addon panel, click the tiny arrow on the top right of the viewport below the viewport shading options. image

Notes

  • The addon GUI (gender, texture, hand pose) does not reflect the state of the currently selected model if you work with multiple models in one scene. It reflects the state of the last model you worked with.
  • To maintain editor responsiveness the addon does not automatically recalculate the pose corrective blendshapes when editing the armature pose. Use the Update Pose Shapes button to update the pose corrective blendshapes after pose changes.

Terminal

Opening the terminal window will allow you to see the output of any running script. It's particularly helpful for displaying progress of lengthier operations, since the UI doesn't show any info. To achieve this with Linux or Mac, you need to launch Blender from the terminal.

Windows

Click Window > Toggle System Console

image

Mac

  • press command + space and type terminal and press enter image

  • leave the terminal window open and open up the applications folder in another window

  • find Blender, right click on it, and select Show Package Contents

  • That will open a new folder. Select Contents > MacOS

  • Inside that folder will be a single file called Blender. Click and drag Blender onto the terminal window you opened in the first step. image

  • Press enter and it will launch blender from the terminal.

Linux

This will be slightly different depending on your Linux distribution.

  • Open the terminal and go to the location of your blender executable.
  • You can also navigate there in the folder view and then launch the terminal from that location. image
  • In the terminal, type blender and press enter. This will launch blender from the terminal.

Getting avatars inside Blender

There are a few ways to get Meshcapade avatars into Blender. One way is to create and download free avatars from our platform, meshcapade.me. You can create up to 5 free avatars a day, or you can purchase credits to be able to do more than that.

Academic or commercial license customers of the SMPL Model (aka Licensed Users) can get an additional component to the plugin that allows them to add an unlimited number of SMPL bodies directly to their scenes. They can either create avatars from scratch, or they can load .npz files that contain not only body shape definitions but animations as well. Both of these methods support SMPL-H (to a limited extent), SMPL-X and SUPR bodies and you can create an unlimited number of avatars using these two methods.

Pose Correctives

Meshcapade avatars have a built in component that allows for statistically accurate pose based deformations. Once a Meshcapade avatar is in your Blender scene, you can animate or pose it as you normally would. Click the Calculate Pose Correctives button for a single frame or Calculate Pose Correctives for Entire Sequence for an animation sequence. This feature is available for all users of our Blender plugin.

Note: A bug exists in Blender up to and including LTS 3.6.1 in which imported .fbx files have their blendshapes clamped to 0 and 1. The pose correctives can have values that are less than 0 and greater than 1, so this is a problem here. After importing your .fbx, click the Fix Blendshape Ranges button on the plugin and it will set all the blendshape ranges to the highest and lowest possible values blender allows: 10 and -10. This is a known issue which Blender has already addressed, it just hasn’t been released as of my writing this.

More information about academic, commercial and R&D licenses can be found on our website or by contacting sales@meshcapade.com.

Facial Expressions

SMPL-X and SUPR bodies have facial expression support. The plugin comes with 6 pre-baked facial expressions (Pleasant, Happy, Excited, Sad, Frustrated, and Angry), a Random Facial Expression button, and a Reset button to set the facial expression back to normal. For finer control of the facial expressions, select the mesh in Object Mode and open the Object Data Properties tab. Under Shape Keys, you can edit th eshape keys that start with Exp to modify the facial expression.

Modifying Shape and Loading Poses

If you have the additional data folder, you have access to a few more features of the plugin. The first is modifying the body shape. There are sliders to change the avatar’s height and weight, along with Random Body Shape and Random Face Shape buttons. The joint locations are automatically updated if you use any of the body shape modification tools from the plugin. You can also fine tune the shape of your avatar using the Shape blendshapes in the Object Data Properties panel.

Along with this, you can also load in poses onto your avatars if you have .npz files that contain animation data, like AMASS, which is free for academic use from Max Planck’s SMPL Model website and available for commercial use through Meshcapade’s MoCap Datasets licenses. If you are loading a pose, be sure to select the correct up-axis in the import options in the top right corner of the popup dialogue.

Additional Tools

The Fix Pose Correctives for Entire Sequence button is explained in the Pose Correctives section.

Meshcapade avatars have additional metadata on them that tell the plugin what gender and SMPL version the selected avatar is. When you click the Modify Metadata button, the SMPL version and gender in the Create section will be written on the selected avatar. You only need to use this if you are trying to use the plugin with older avatars that do not have this data encoded on them. You can also use this to change metadata on an avatar that already has metadata on it, but this will likely cause problems.

Read Metadata writes the metadata to the console.

The two Write Pose buttons are so that you can see the poses in SMPL format. This is something our internal machine learning scientists need.

Textured SMPL & SMPLX models

If you are interested in only the SMPL, SMPLX textured sample files, you can access them here: https://github.com/Meshcapade/SMPL_texture_samples

Licenses

Acknowledgements

Joachim Tesch, creator of the original blender addon for SMPL-X. This repo is a commercial-use extension of his addon which is available for academic use here.

Changelog

  • 20210505: Initial release
  • 20210525: Replaced vertices-to-joints regressor with beta-to-joints regressor. Added rainbow texture (CC BY-NC 4.0).
  • 20210611: Added option to set shape from height and weight values for female and male models
  • 20210820: Created Meshcapade fork
  • 20230904: Plugin overhaul. Added SUPR and limited SMPL-H support to the plugin.

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