Convert To MHX

The MHX rig was originally developed by myself when I was working on the MakeHuman project.The acronym stands for MakeHuman eXchange, although the DAZ version has nothing to do with MakeHuman anymore. The MHX rig has been greatly improved in version 1.6 of the DAZ Importer, thanks to input from Engetudouiti and Alessandro Padovani.

The MHX Runtime System has been split off as a separate Blender add-on, which is distributed together with the DAZ Importer. There are several reasons for this. People who don't use the MHX rig don't have to enable the MHX RTS, saving some memory and space in the UI panel. More importantly, the BVH Retargeter was also MHX aware, so there were two versions of the same code, which essentially did the same thing but were slightly different.

Documentation for the MHX Runtime System.

Press Convert to MHX. There are a number of options.

• Tweak Bones: Add tweak bones to fine-tune poses.
• Reuse Bend And Twist Bones: Use the original bend-twist bones and vertex groups.
• Split Shin Bones: plit the shin bone into bend and twist parts.
• Add Back And NeckHead Bones: Add back and neckhead bones which rotate the spine and neck/head bones together.
• Show Link Bones: Add bones which link IK pole targets to the joint they control (elbow or knee).
• Finger IK: Generate IK controls for fingers. Finger morphs will be removed.
• Tongue IK: Generate IK controls for tongue. Tongue morphs will be removed.
• Keep DAZ Rig: Keep existing armature and meshes in a new collection.
• ChildOf Constraints (Experimental): Use childOf constraints for parents of elbow and knee pole targets. May cause problems for FK-IK snapping.
• Elbow Parent: Parent of elbow pole target.
  • Hand: Parent elbow pole target to IK hand.
  • Shoulder: Parent elbow pole target to shoulder.
  • Master: Parent elbow pole target to the master bone.
• Knee Parent: Parent of knee pole target.
  • Foot: Parent knee pole target to IK foot.
  • Hip: Parent knee pole target to hip.
  • Master: Parent knee pole target to the master bone.
• Rename Face Bones: Rename face bones from l/r prefix to .L/.R suffix.

Aiko is now controlled by an MHX rig. It starts out in IK (Inverse Kinematics) mode, and the IK layers are enabled.

Face bones carry over to the new rig, so it is still possible to do facial posing in the Face Units, Expressions and Visemes panels. Expressions can be tweaked with the face bones on the Face layer (armature layer 9), provided that the Make All Bones Poseable was invoked before the rig was converted to MHX. If the face bones are not poseable, the Face layer is empty.

When an MHX rig is selected, the MHX RTS tab contains controls that are useful for posing it. See the Documentation for the MHX Runtime System for more details.

IK FIX. note by Alessandro Padovani.

I may point out that “fix elbows and knees“ is not necessary. That is, we either use “improve ik“ or “fix elbows and knees“ not both. Then “improve ik“ is compatible with daz poses, while “fix elbows and knees“ is not because it changes the rig pivots. Specifically, if you save pose presets then "fix elbows and knees" will cause jittering, so don't use this option.

Please note that for prebended rigs, that is, rigs with bended limbs in rest pose, we don't need to fix IK, so none of the ik fix options is to be used.