I'm experimenting with workflow design for mo-cap in A:M. I've had lots of fun looking at and playing with assigning bvh motion to characters, but decided i wanted to see what kind of real flexibility I could get out of A:M. So this morning I took my first crack at building a practical work flow for mo-cap.

The problems I'm working on are:
How to bake out the bvh constraints but leave the TSM constraints intact;
How to avoid rescaling the bvh skeleton everytime you load a new file.

My solution is in the attached project. I built a proxy skeleton, a simple skeleton that is the size of the character that you constrain to the bvh files (I built it for the basic TSM guy that is included on the A:M cd or available at Anzovin.com).

The workflow would be as follows:
1. build proxy skeleton

2. Create an action for the proxy skeleton

3. Import a bvh file into the action.

4. Constrain the proxy skeleton to the bvh. I've used a single "translate to" constraint on the hips, everything else is "orient like" only. This works(at least with the freebvh.com files) because the hips are the only bone with translate data. It helps to scale the whole bvh so that the hip to ground distance is about the same as the character, otherwise the rise and fall on the steps is too great.

5. Bake the action.

6. In the CHOREOGRAPHY, constrain your character to the proxy skeleton. Load baked actions onto the proxy.

In my brief experimenting this seems to work pretty good. It's been much easier to work with the actions. In the sample I included a choreography with two baked actions applied to the proxy with a really lame transition between them. I've also added some animation on the choregoraphy action to roughly line up the skeleton between the two actions.

The attached zip includes the project, actions, and model for the proxy. You will need to add the basic TSM guy or a model of your choice. Please let me know if you have any comments or better ideas.

Ben

Thank You!!!

Just what I wanted. I really appreciate you posting this. If you need any BVH's, please email me. Thx again.

JG

What's bake action?
And how to bake action?

Lee

Baking an action removes the constraints you've applied and replaces them with transform keys on the constrained bone. You accomplish this from the action menu on the toolbar of an action window.

Ben

I'm slowwwwly coming around to baking. Just (relearned) that I need to 'bake' my TSM2 char actions before exporting to Arctic Pigs. (Remember Arctic Pigs?) Those were the days...AP...NHL...