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MB-Lab 1.7.5 Character Editor adds new GUI, Shaders and Face Rig

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After the popular ManuelBastioniLAB, the free and open source character editor for Blender, unexpectedly shut down the project late last year, a community fork took over. A bit new release now sees the light, adding some solid updates.

animate1978 writes:

MB-Lab 1.7.5 is released!

This is supposed to be the "stable" build of MB-Lab and Blender 2.80 RC1 and above, this is the version we have been building up to since version 1.6.5, the last version for Blender 2.79.

Remember Blender 2.80 has been in BETA for some time, it has only recently come out of that status and MB-Lab has been worked on to work with it since version 1.7.0, sometimes with buggy releases of it's own but over the past couple of months have really tried hard to squash the most serious bugs that have popped up. In our eyes from version 1.7.0 to 1.7.4 have been developmental versions, as some of you may recall there have been MANY bugs in MB-Lab over the past 6 months, some of them quite serious.

Version 1.7.5 has been in development for 3 months and has been heavily tested to make sure that things work. The outstanding issues still present are not serious enough to hold off on releasing this.

New Features this release :

GUI change. Now there are icons EVERYWHERE!

This is one of the most striking changes between previous versions and this one, the GUI has been worked on quite a bit.

Tongue Shader

For some reason it took forever to realize the tongue changed color with changes to skin complexion so this shader was created

Improved Iris and Eye Shaders

This was a late addition to the release but it is an improved version of the iris, which the first version looked awful, so this one was a nice surprise.

Face Rig Updates

The face rig has not gotten touched since it's introduction, the developer Amir has done quite a bit to it and now includes a FACS rig as well

BVH Bone Config

With this feature, you'll be able to tweak XYZ bone rotations, store in a file for a specific BVH Animation ( or more depending on the adjustments ) and then simply load this file whenever you want to reuse that BVH animation and the tweaked bones will self-adjust.

Documentation Updates

The documentation has been updated for this release specifically with new imagery to replace the old Blender 2.79 images.

About the Author

I have a long history in 3D art, been using Blender since the earliest days before it became open source. Used to help in the development of the Blender to Renderman pipeline, used to own the Blender to Renderman domain name, which was devoted to the that subject. Now my current project is further development of the MB-Lab addon

5 Comments

  1. One of the most common issues is installation of MB-Lab, which we all admit is a pain because of how GitHub packages release ZIP files. This is taken from the our documentation site :

    https://mb-lab.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

    Step 1

    In Blender 2.80, open the user preferences window, choosing Edit → Preferences

    Step 2

    Press the “Install” button in the top right side of the window

    Step 3

    Use the file selector window in order to find the zip file, select it and click the button “Install Addon from File”.

    Step 4

    When the installation will be completed, a new category named “Characters” will appear in the Categories list. Select it and enable the lab using the check button. When the plugin is enabled, remember to press the button “Save User Settings”, in order to load the lab automatically each time you start Blender.

    Step 5

    Close the User Preferences window.

    Press “N” to make the Sidebar with the MB-Lab interface appear in Blender 2.80

    • Oh m. G. I forgot that installing from file means that it installs from a zip file.
      I was a little out of blender so ...................

      Thanks anyway for the help.

      I am such an id..........:)

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