Problems with BVH import

steenbaker

Hello,

I am having some trouble with importing a BVH file into Daz and getting the Daz figure to match the animations motions.

I did the motion capture on the daz genesis 8 skeleton, and did manual touchups in blender 2.8

But as you can see from the video below there are some discrepencies when I try to import the animation into Daz. Sometimes the arms don't move correctly, and at one point Daz just stops applying the hip rotation.

I've seached around quite a bit just to get as far as I have, and I've seen a few examples of people with the same issues as me, but they don't address them.

Does anyone have any advice for me? I'd take anything at this point.

The only alternative I have is to export my characters out of Daz and just do all my rendering in Blender. However that is a monumental task, one that stopped me completely in my tracks. I absolutelly canno't make anything exported from daz look even remotely presentable in blender, and all the tools designed to help facilitate that process are not up to date for daz 4.11 and blender 2.8.

 

Anyways. Heres a short video showing the problems I am having, and how I got to this point.

I would greatly appreciate any help.

https://youtu.be/37rV67-XhFk

 

EDIT: I think I figured out why the hips stop rotating near the end. It looks like the hips Y axis cannot rotate past -180 in daz. So I opened that parameters settings and disabled the limites (No idea why disabling rotation limits doesnt do exactly this) and that seems to allow the hips to rotate like they should. However the hair behaves as if the hips are still locked at -180 and does not follow the characters head. Otherwise the arms not twisting during the stretch can be manually rotated in daz to the correct position, but that would be a pain to do for every frame, plus it does not explain why it wont move to that position itself, since it's not hitting a hard limit like the hips. I still have no idea why the arms won't cross the chest either.

pdr0

Before applying BVH, disable all limits on all nodes. Not just the hip
Right click the root node of figure => select => select children
Edit => figure => Limits => Limits off (rotation)

It depends on how the motion and bones were specified in the BVH, you may have to unlock some nodes as well

If you have to unlock nodes, it's a similar procedure:

Right click the root node of figure => select => select children
Edit => figure => Locks => unlock selected nodes

 

steenbaker

Thanks Pdr0, that solved some of the issues but not others. I've resorted to manually editing the keyframes, which is a tedious task in the daz timeline, and not very pretty in the end product. But I suppose it works.

pdr0

What other issues ? Can you describe them ?

1) Is your BVH "baked" to every key, every frame ? Because interpolation between keys can result in differences between programs

2) Did you have "locks" enabled in the BVH motion ? Does it use the twist bones in blender ?  

Check to see if the data was copied correctly into the correct channels. Sometimes the name is slightly off between the BVH and what DS expects - even if the BVH mapping "looks" correct in the BVH import options - sometimes the keys are not copied correctly to the correct x,y,z channel.   Check the values in blender for , say the R shoulder bend, and R shoulder twist on a given frame. Check the same in DS in the parameters tab for the same frame. It might be as simple as using a text editor to change some prefixes