Avatar bvh animation

[Jerry]

With the earlier avatar system using Avatar.py I was able to
animate an avatar with a .bvh animation file, e.g.,
Jack.loadAction('_human_wave.bvh').
Is it possible to animate the new avatars with a .bvh?

[tobin]

Not directly within vizard but 3ds max is pretty good at importing bvh files so this provides the recommended work flow.

[Jerry]

Could you explain what the steps in the work flow would be?

[Veleno]

Hey, Jerry.

You would start by importing your motion caputere data in max onto a max biped. Then you would follow the normal cal3d exporting process. You can then add the avatar and play the animations in Vizard as you would with any other cal3d avatar.

To my knowledge, Max does not currently have a way to use motion capture data with regular bones. Biped has its own controls for importing and manipulating motion capture data. Whether you want to skin the avatar before or after animating the biped is completely up to you.

A tutorial for importion motion capture data so can be found in Max by going to Help --> Tutorials then doing a search for "Motion Capture". I recommend including the quotes so it searches for the terms as a phrase. The tutorial that should help you out is called Working with Motion-Capture Data.

The Max User Reference (also found under the help menu) also has some information importing the data. For that part, do a search for "To import a motion-capture file", select Motion Capture Rollout from the list, scroll down a litle bit and look under the procedures heading.

The general tutorial for exporting to cal3d can be found here:
download.gna.org/cal3d/documentation/modeling/tutorial.html (http://download.gna.org/cal3d/documentation/modeling/tutorial.html)

Though the tutorial demonstrates exporting using the Physique modifier for skinning, cal3d can also use the Skin modifier instead which many animators perfer over the other.