Question: are MHX rigs supposed to work without the addon?

[Simon Patrick]

This might be a silly question but I’m curious: are imported models using an MHX rig supposed to work properly without the addon being enabled?

Right now what happens is that reloading a blender file with the MHX addon disabled results in rig switching to FK by the looks of it but other than that it seems to be working

[Thomas Larsson]

The idea was that it should work like this:

• To generate the mhx rig both the daz importer and the mhx rts must be enabled.
• To animate the mhx rig only the mhx rts should be necessary.
• To render an animated mhx rig, e.g. at a render farm, neither addon should be needed.

However, I now realize that the third step doesn’t work. The problem is that the mhx rts defines rna properties (python attributes), and but if the addon is not enabled those properties become id properties (python keys), and drivers don’t work unless those definitions are loaded. I have to think about how to deal with that.

[Simon Patrick]

Thanks for the clarification

[Thomas Larsson]

Reopening this because there should be a way to make the mhx rig independent of the addon, so you can send files to a render farm and not encounter unpleasant surprises.

[Thomas Larsson]

In the last commit (MHX RTS) there is a new button in the main MHX panel: Bake MHX. It changes all drivers so that RNA properties are replaced with the corresponding Id properties. This makes the drivers work even if the MHX RTS addon is disabled. The Unbake MHX button does the opposite thing.

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[Simon Patrick]

I will do more testing and ask other people who encountered the same problem to do the same, but it seems like baking the rig no longer results in this freezing issue: https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/1534/blender-freezing-when-appending-model-with

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Video proof: https://mega.nz/file/OzJj3BoK#hEr_3CFiXszm20OvhvjV1c02W1LU3l70lRr22EpRi6g

[Simon Patrick]

Baking seems to work as intended