bvh hell in blender

Support Animation and Rigging
1

hi all.

It’s now been 3 days i’m trying to animate toons in blender. Thought the various tools are quite spread around all blender and particularily obfuscated and harsh, anything seems to be doable…

design mesh, armature, weight paint, animakting, frame-keying, etc…

The hell comes when the user just dont want to spend 17 billion years making all the possible anims he want and need, and got interrested in the numerous bvh files that can be found around the net.
lets take the ones at carneggie mellon university…

All import correctly in blender and ALT+A gives them life. now the crazy user want to apply this awesome walk cycle to his own armature… oO
OK let’s honestly confess we just push the ‘mess everything’ button.
Now lets have a look at this bvh a bit closer. all is ok, as much as it is in BVHacker…
The thing come on the rest pose:

bvh_crap.jpg861×597 69.5 KB


On the left you got the bvh armature when animating, in pose mode, and on the right, we have the ‘rest pose’
We could better call it a death pose ! :smiley:
As it is the pose we use for building our mesh and weight-painting it, how are we supposed to do it on a totally messed up armature ?
Am very surprised blender can import useless bvh files !
There’s no way to retarget anything or change anything. Yu cannot set a normal pose as a rest one as all transformations are relative to the rest pose.
The mocap tools plugin is also unable to achieve proper things.
etc etc etc…

OK i confess it’s damn highly complicated maths ! translations, rotations, quaternions, etc…
but, did anyone successfully imported a bvh file and made his model ‘walk’ with blender ?

if yes, would be nice if you can share the info :wink:

Ah also… i saw mebe… 12-13 tutorials on the subject. If you know good accurate and reproductible ones
please lemme know :slight_smile:

thanks to all for your help !

2

BUMP !

noone knows ?

Anybody making anims in blender ? using BVHs ?

3

I don’t know the solution, but I suppose importing rig from an app to other is always a HELL…

4

i do a fast test importing BVHs

To use quaternions is better that Euler

And every is working fine

Do you have any link to the bvh library just to try ?

5

sure :slight_smile:

have a look at http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/
here you can get many BVH files.

I’ll have to give a try to quaternions.

If anyone else got ideas …?

thanks.

6

I had this issue before. YOu need to download the
The Daz-friendly BVH files from here : https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/daz-friendly-release
Use Bvh Hacker to edit your bvh.
When retargeting, make sure your in Object mode or all you gonna get is Copy rotation and location from the BVH rig to the user rig and thats not what you want.

7

hi blenderboy.

I didn’t try yet the daz-friendly BVH.

I wonder what is BVHacker for ? To me it’s just a bvh viewer that allows bones to be zeroed in movement. Am i wrong ? Is there a use for BVHacker ?

Even when in object mode, the result is a messed up armature.
Also, the empty driving the target armature drives it far away after 2 or 3 frames. it has to be
deleted before you hit ALT+A.

well all this just don’t work. Ah i forgot to mention that the source anim comes from mixamo.
It’s a free anim i used for tries.

mocrap.jpg550×571 44.3 KB


Am posting the blend here. If anyone cant have a look ( i hope the mocap tools developper would. i think it’s
a good school case to see for him :stuck_out_tongue: )
mocrap_tools.zip (1.69 MB)

there you are.

please help. I confess i’m getting out of ideas on this. I’ll give a try to bvh for daz but i’m wondering wether i should
use a real anim tool instead of blender… really :frowning:

8

ok. just tried a daz friendly mocap.

In overall the result looks better though it’s just crap. you know it’s mostly like the bumpmaps you create from a diffuse map.
It gives some relief but it’s anything but realistic…
Here the anim copy on my armature is the same kind of thing. anything but correct. twists are legions, and the ‘solve twist’ button
in the mocrap_tools is quite useless.

If you look at my bones, none are twisted. The roll axis at conception is 0° for all bones. On the mocap armature, bones roll are quite random… Though after retargetting, my armature seems to walk, a weighted model looks ugly.
We could think that those daz bvh armatures are crappy. Not at all. A bone sould be able to be twisted. The thing is that my armature should have the same twist for giving someting correct.
It’s pretty strange that mocap tools don’t work properly. A quaternion is a magical math tool that can encode rotation and relative rotation ( and many other thingies ) in a 4x4 float array. It should be able to drive my armature bones relative to teh daz armature bones. It’s not the case.
And there’s also this empty driving my armature away :smiley: lol
If mocap tool is unable to handle an XYZ coordinate based on a scale ( the scaling of the daz model ) i doubt it can handle muuuuuuch more complicated things like rotations ( looooooool !!! ) :smiley:

Am really upset that blender is unable to just do such simple things.
Once again we’ll have big stunning new things in new releases ( explosions, fluids, and many other sexy useless stuff ) and mandatory important things are left apart. OK i can understant it’s more fun coding explosion stuff than a math tool using composite rotation transposed or inverted matrixes, or even a knife ( SHIFT-K héhé ) that works.

now if real artists make some real animation in blender ( not all this toy things that are proof of no concept ) i’d be really pleased to
receieve lessons, tips, tricks, and anything else. In the meanwhile i gonna give an eye to real professionnal things like daz.

too bad :frowning:

9

Blender is perfectly able to use Maximo BVH file, that’s what they say themselves:

http://www.mixamo.com/c/help/workflows_blender

10

yes, provided you use their rig, or a rig wich is exactly the same as theirs

11

Have you tried the built-in BVH retargeting tools that come with Blender?

12

Hi atom.

Yes i already explained it in my previous posts.
Mocap_tools is awesome !!!.. on the paper. but pretty useless.
Just get the blend i posted and have fun with mocap_tools on it. You will certainly discover new hip-hop gestures but i
challenge you to copy armature A on armature B ( in a proper way i mean. Without twists ).

Imo mocap tools is THE way. but it’s a tool that should be seriously worked on, coz as it now it’s just useless and
time-consuming ( it’s been 2,5 weeks am trying to use it now )

Any other idea ?

2 days ago, i downloaded DAZ studio ( lmao !!! amazing to talk about competitors on a blender forum ! i confess it’s too bad, but
sorry there’s no choice ). I tried it. interface is… well not bad… ( when you’re used to blender, DAZ is not that intuitive ). models are nice but far too high poly for realtime, and anim integration is quite easy. The deal comes with export. impossible to export any animation to a collada (.dae) or .fbx file !!! I think i’m missing someting. I’ll have to dig this as it might be a way to get an working anim
workflow DAZ->blender->unity3D…

have nice blends !

13

Without twists
You may have tried this, but there are anti-twisting switches built into the mapping tools to prevent twisting.

I just started playing with the Mocap Tools and I find they fail more than they work, but the foundation for the workflow is there. I am just not sure how well the toolset works with modern rigs as opposed to just an armature made up of non-constrained bones. Everytime I try to connect an IK foot to a performer foot I get no action. Not sure what is going on there?

14

hi atom.
I’ts not a matter of modern or old rig. A rig is a rig. The one i made is just the simplest one for a humanoid mesh. 2 legs, 2 arms, a spine and a head. that’s all. Wil all bones twisted to 0°.

Logically any kind of same rig could be copied through a proper use of quaternion ( it’s not rocket science, it’s just simple pre-graduate math that any 18 yold ppl studying it are able to understand ). The deal is that mocap tools surely don’t use this method. Wich explains it’s totally unable to copy bones rotations with an offset ( including a potential twist offset ).
I lost almost 2 weeks on this crap and honestly i really don’t understant why it’s in the blender trunk.

now… I’ve found a solution using daz, exporting to collada, and importing in blender to reduce the mesh tris count and or use the rig
on my own models as a reference rig. Daz is nothing but intuitive, but at least it makes things working.
The good point is that daz studio is now free. You’ll just have to spend time on discovering how it works ( because their doc is ridiculously small )

I repeat again here but it’s really a kind of frustration that it’s too bad blender don’t focus on very important things and prefer developping stunning useless stuff.

For the IK thing, atom, i didn’t try. i assume that if the tool is inefficient on simple things, it’s probably messy in other more complicated ones.

have nice blends :slight_smile:

15

I for one own and use other commercial 3D softwares… XSI (my favorite) and Lightwave… I have used professionally, Maya and Studio Max… I use AutoCAD softwares almost every day… and I have yet to see any of those Softwares out perform Blender in the area of Rigging style Character animation… Sorry if you have been frustrated by your efforts… so was I when I first started out in Rigging… I suggest you go spend $1500.00 on a copy of Lightwave and try doing the same things your trying to do with Blender… then get back with us on your gripes about Blender then… I am sure you will be offended at me telling you these things… but… I am telling it like it is… I think your words are falling on deaf ears here… Because many of the users in this forum have been around the 3D animation software block a couple of times and have landed here at Blender for a reason… So please if you find other software that do it better than Blender… Please be our Guest to move to those softwares and have at it… I use other Softwares as well… I never find any reason to Grip at Blender because … Number one… it’s free… Number two… it’s Open Source… which means if I dont’ like the way it works… I am perfectly welcome to dive into it’s code and fix it… so it works the way I want it to work…

Again… not to start a flame war here… but Hey… I"m just sayin’…

I personally have always found it strange that people would spend all day at work, working on half baked over priced Software that never ever does what it was advertised to do… having to use constant work arounds because they UpDated the software last week… and that they still didn’t fix the stuff they promised to fix from 8 updates ago… and then I realize that We all paid Thousands of dollars… (not hundreds mind you) but Thousands… for these guys to screw us over like this… Then they have the audacity to tell us we don’t even own the software on top of that… And we certainly don’t have access to the code so that if we happened to be able to know how to fix the software … we can’t…

So when I get a chance to use Blender… well it really is a grand pleasure… don’t you think?

16

hi norvman.

I’d be offended if i take your words seriously and obviously you’re not. You’re lending me words i didn’t tell, and therefore, they remain your own as the lesson you try to give.
You spent bunch of bills in crappy software that you’re not satisfied in. well at least this means you’re luckily wealthy ! And unfortunately it is the way we learn in life :wink:
You also seem to have enough rocket science to recode blender ! wow i’m impressed ! i code in very various languanges, from asm
to Boo since now 25 years but i would never allow myself to offer people reworking hundreds of thousands of code lines !
To me the argument was available for people like Torvald wo wrote a pretty small wonderfull piece of code. But i doubt there’s a human on this world who is able to recode blender, gimp, kde, x, lspci or whatever. The argument you try to place is just a polite translation of ‘shut-up and get lost’.

The reason i came to blender is not because it’s free. am sorry to destroy this ‘price’ theory far too common in the ‘free software world’ but it has no value to me. I just came to it because people who make it, just don’t make it for money. Therefore we can thing they make it for users. I agree this is awesome and i’d easily bet that it’s the main reason why blender is many feets ahead other softwares.
People making a tool for user and not money naturally make it efficient and user oriented. Assuming this it’s deeply frustrating that for example anim retargetting or knife tool still don’t work at their bests ! I think you can understand and agree with this, can’t you ?

for sure, no need for a flame war ! am just saying… :wink:

What am upset for is that it seems noone is able to help on such simple things.
Can you imagine my 250 various rigged toon meshes that i would have to totally rework because i want to make them do a movement they didn’t do before ? :smiley: this would be a BIG LOL !
seriously i cannot imagine this can’t be done in blender. There’s just the need of someone who already did it once accepting to give
the clue over there. nothin more.

I’m glad of the pleasure you got when having the chance to use blender !
I can give your one more if you want and post a blend with 2 rigs ( one with IK and a second one for movement copies ).
It could also give you the chance of explaining how to achieve this to me :wink:
i’d sincerely be fond of it !

have a nice day and nice blends !

17

Sure, post your rig and I’ll give the Motion Tools a try with a BVH from the Carnegie Mellon motion capture library.

18

personally I’ve never had a probem importing onto a “twisted up” BVH file, as you dont use the BVH armature on the character mesh anyway, so seeing its edit mode positions is pretty much irrelevant.
most BVH files have a T pose built into the first few frames, (or even negative frames) so its trivial to set up a mocap animation onto your own rigs, what atom said about “better” rigs with constraints and built in IK is completely true though, I usually just turn the influence of the constraints to 0 and constrain up to the bvh file afterwards.

19

In general, mocap is a dicey thing. I agree that the mocap tools are not adequate in Blender – but that is symptomatic of Blender because it tries to be all things to all people, and the breadth of the product is staggering. There is no other product that does what Blender does, feature for feature.

But, that leaves it a mile wide and a foot deep in places. In some places it is exceptional. MoCap is not one of them. If you need to use MoCap, I strongly recommend using MotionBuilder – it excels at retargeting and cleaning up MoCap. Blender will continure to frustrate you.

However, having said that, let me also say that with MoCap, you kind of get what you pay for. The CMU MoCap is fine for testing, but you will not get the results you want there. It is not commercial grade. If you really want to do MoCap, you either need to pay for commercial grade files, or get a rig and make your own. CMU’s library is not really there. You’d probably be better off with Mixamo or True Bones.

But when I talk to people trying to get mocap to work, it seems like they are thinking it is a magic bullet that will get them out of having to learn animation. This is not true. If you read the interviews with the animators who did Golem and the Avatar stuff, you will find they had a team of people working to clean up the moCap data – and that is professionally made MoCap that was created specifically for their shots. MoCap is OK for background motions in a game, or something like that. But using MoCap for a hero character is a lot more work than people realize. At the end of the day, you are probably better off hand animating.

20

I totally agree with you !

Yes i confess i’m a nood in moving toons. And i got special constraints like mesh faces and bone low counts.
The think is that blender on moving armatures, and playing around with all the anim stuff is ‘’‘’‘’‘’‘‘ALMOST’’‘’‘’‘’‘’ awesome !
There’s just 1 or 2 missing functions that would do all the needed things. Just like a real bone rot constraint in real world coordinates.
Currently it copies the rotation in a mixed world/local coordinates. It’s a wrong behaviour. The ‘child’ of constrainst would do the job for rotation, but unfortunately it also changes the bone coordinates.
I know it’s nothing but 2 simple lines of code for ppl who coded bone constraints to make all things work. Should i spend 2-3 months learning python, and 4-5 months discovering and understanding how blender works and where is the code part i’m concerned in, to change it myself ? I think not.
This is the source of frustration.
Anyway i’ll go on trying, and yes, if there’s no other way i’ll do anims by hand. Will remind me the lost times when printing was not yet inveted. You want a book ? just copy it yourself… At the era of computing this is quite weird !

thanks and have nice blends !