Way to automatically center a mocap animation?

anon_51512958 · February 11, 2009, 7:35am

Hey folks,

Anyone know if there’s a way to simply/automatically center a mocap animation? For example, the free CMU BVH database has lots of great movements, but their “walking” and other animations move the character around, whereas I’d like the animation to stay centered so I can move the transform around via physics, script, etc.

I just picked up 3d Studio Max… I’m hoping there’s a simple import option I overlooked

Thanks!

anon_85819370 · February 11, 2009, 12:05pm

Hello,

Not sure how to do this in 3DS Max but what I did in mine is convert the mocap to keyframe, highlight all keyframes then zero out the forward transform.

Ray

anon_51512958 · February 13, 2009, 5:31am

Hmm… sounds about right. Can you share how you do it with your particular software (hoping it’s Cheetah or Blender, which I also have!)

AaronC · February 13, 2009, 10:04pm

If you search/look through the external tools thread here, you’ll find a short movie I made converting bvh to fbx using blender.

HTH
AC

anon_22090388 · February 13, 2009, 11:35pm

First off: this is not an answer to your question.

But there’s another technique to the common way of moving characters around that makes it much easier to lock the feet on the ground.

The idea is you have one full walk cycle where the character actually moves forward in the animation itself (as you describe). as this animation plays, you don’t change the transform. Only when the cycle resets do you jump the model forward so that the last frame of the animation locks up with the first frame. An advantage is the character’s feet will stay locked to the ground perfectly.

This technique is a bit trickier to program at first, but if can make it work, it makes dealing with non-linear movement easier – for example a MoCap of a character side-stepping.

Anyway, it’s probably overkill, but I figured I’d mention it.

anon_51512958 · February 18, 2009, 7:23am

FYI - I played around with the freeware BVH Hacker a bit (bvhacker - home), and finally discovered that you can clamp the translation of the animations (X Z in my case, to keep it centered on the “ground” plane), which works pretty much perfectly.

You can also clamp rotation if you so desire… it’s a pretty powerful tool.

Now all I have to do is figure out a way to batch clamp all 2400 TrueBones animations…