📢Greetings MH2 Creators,

-🎉 We are incredibly excited to announce that the MakeHuman 2 first major expansion/patch is live on Steam! The Fantasy patch is now ready to be downloaded. This expansion, like the original MH2, is completely free to use and create with. As always, our software is AGPL, and all of our content is CC0 and CC-BY with respect to the original creators. Please note we are still in an ongoing alpha state at present; all feedback and bug finding is highly encouraged and so very helpful!

-⚡ The original Steam version along with the legacy (final alpha release) of MakeHuman 2 will remain available for download for the foreseeable future! The version you choose is entirely up to you. The Fantasy expansion is mostly the same as the current one; however, it unlocks all the new fantasy features also. To avoid any chance of loss of your personal work, always backup before downloading/updating new versions from Steam.

-The most current patch notes can be found below. Briefly, for the sake of explanation, the major difference between the base MH2 and Fantasy versions is the usage of extra body parts in both morphing and posing/animating. For creators, there is now a fantasy helper mesh to allow for body part creation in Blender with MakeClothes 2. This release also includes the default fantasy skeleton, which works with the new body parts (and the original hm08 body parts).

-🐧 Linux Support & The Compatibility Pivot: To ensure we could dedicate 100% of our development time to polishing this expansion and maintaining our current development velocity, we have made a strategic shift regarding Linux support. Instead of dividing our tiny team across separate native builds, MakeHuman 2 now officially targets Steam compatibility mode. Linux has been shown to run the Windows build flawlessly on Linux desktops with near-native performance. This ensures our Linux community gets this expansion—and all future content drops at the exact same time as Windows users, without more issues than necessary.

~>If you are on Linux, just ensure Steam Play or compatibility mode is enabled in your steam settings!

~>Please note: We have not given up on a native Linux Steam build, we just do not want anyone left out of this release if possible!

Also note: Presently we cannot test the Steam Deck unfortunately. Feedback with this is really anticipated!

~> Behind the Scenes: We are still actively developing native Linux features behind closed doors. If you want to follow our raw development logs, see what we are working on next, or directly support our tiny team's open-source efforts, check out our community page on Patreon!

-🛠️ As always the code is available on github as source & feedback welcome at any time.

-🐉 🦄 Fantasy Style DLC is available at this time. There is a completely free content pack to download, and a patron one available also, both in the steam store.

-Feel free to Join us on Discord- and make your thoughts and observations known!

-Stay Tuned for more news & Information to come soon!

The July 25 Fantasy release patch/changenotes:

✨New Features:

• glass shader pbr

• normals for phong shader

• fantasy base mesh for MH2

• fantasy helpers for blender MC2

• fantasy skeleton MH2 and exportable in base mesh with parts.

• basic parts for fantasy mesh in MH2

• obj exporter now works with posed character and accepts specular color

• changes in renderer to also allow foreground render

• ability to load assetpacks using a parent mesh

🔋Quality of life improvements:

• first installation: test if user area is writable

• material-editor: mhmat file loader button, possibility to modify specular color

• cache clearing button in preferences.

• double clicking for selections

• sqlite reload (cached database) can be triggered from menu

• file selector to make search easier when an asset-pack zip file is already downloaded

• small changes for single asset download to allow more materials to be put in correct folder

• splitter sliders added.

• fixed pathnames for default assets

• the default skeleton now is packaged with build

🐞Bugfixes:

• normals for pbr shader corrected

• avoid showing mesh bugs when loading character (it froze system)

• obj exporter now should not do artifacts, fixed specular vs. emission, it also allows materials of same name

• gltf, mh2b should work with corrections

• changed behaviour to use mhpose file similar as bvh file (correction of bones, using it in renderer etc)

• ability to correct bones in animation NOT used in bvh files

• saving model: use a different method for MHM file caching, since neither name nor uuid had to be changed.(this resulted in only one visible file)

• eye-materials only in user folder, meshes in system folder (materials were not found)

• proxy vs. basemesh. After changing material, materialeditor crashed

• character info: when mesh was changed, character info window was messed up