Maya BVH Plugin

[ka-ro]

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does anyone know of a maya plugin that can import bvh-mocap files?
i found one on highend3d which works really well, but is only available until version 8.0

i also found a mel script for importing bvh files, but that is painfully slow...

[bclark]

Motionbuilder... it would be the fastest to load and manage large amounts of files. I guess it depends on what your needs are.

you could try writing to the plugin author to post sourcecode or to recompile it for you.

if it is a one time deal, use the script.. or some one with Mobu can do a one time load and save to fbx for you... easy enough, I could do it no problem.

[claydough]

Truespace is a free download. ( fer bvh to Maya I believe it will export to collada )

http://www.caligari.com/default.asp

[ka-ro]

sure, i could use motionbuilder, but i want to stay in maya. i wrote a script that automatically transfers the mocap data to my custom skeleton, and as i always try to streamline my workflow as well as i can it would have been neat to do all that in maya 2009, where i could have used the new animation layers to clean up the mocaps.

it's not a one time thing, so it would make sense to stay in one app, but maybe i'm just weird that way. on the other hand, it's kind of silly that each new version of maya (and others) is getting more bloated and can't do some basic stuff...

anyway, thx for your posts. btw, collada is a pain in the neck to work with, from what i've experienced first-hand.

[djTomServo]

sure, i could use motionbuilder, but i want to stay in maya.

if you didn't want to "use" motionbuilder perse, you could do it all with a single python control script that remotes into motionbuilder and does the coversion/export then fires off the maya process. It sorta depends, i mean if you're talking about doing this one file at a time, i could see this being a somewhat heavy handed approach, but if you're talking about doing a batch process, it's probable feasible. Ideally you would be able to do motionbuilder python standalone like maya's so you could do everything totally headless, but again, it seems like this sort of thing probably gets less and less practical as the number of files you're processing at one time gets smaller and smaller

[Rob Galanakis]

Do it the long way and just run a batch overnight?

It really shouldn't be that slow, either- unless the files are very large, I don't know what'd take so long.

[loocas]

Writing your own BVH importer should be a piece of cake. It depends on what you wanna do with the data. Retargetting? Or simple anim previews or something like that? Retargetting would be a bit more difficult, but still doable in my opinion.

[djTomServo]

Writing your own BVH importer should be a piece of cake.

THat's true, it is a dog simple format. In fact, you could even take the existing maya BVH mel script that's floating around and make it faster. There are quite a few obvious spots you could optimize it in if you're up for a fun little exercise in software engineering