I applied a BVH-file (taking drunken steps, btw) to Michael, and he started up from yTran at about 40. That would be okay if I wanted him there, but I decided to drop him to floor. Now I have this strange problem to be solved:

Michael takes gigantic steps. As he is shaking himself forward, the whole character moves miles in few frames. What could be the matter? There is no visible walk path to edit -that would be too easy- nor have I found anyplace where the actual movement of character could be removed from BVH.

Has anyone a clue how to remove the movement from the character so that I could apply my own walkpath to that poor drunken Michael?

-Hilt

If you want him to walk in place, Turn off IK and zero out the Hip X & Z translations for all keyframes. And you probably would have had better and faster results if you had translated the figure's Body in the first frame to get the figure at ground level rather than using 'Drop to Floor'. The latter translates the hip, which is already keyframed in the animation, while the former moves the figure without affecting the other data in the BVH. Translating the Hip could have caused your gigantic step problem.

I think you're running up against the Poser scale issue. As you know, Poser models are tiny compared to their equivalents in other 3D packages. The BVH file is probably sized for larger characters. While importing the BVH file, select the "Scale Automatically" option.

auto-scaling only works with the propack when importing BVH files

Thank you for your replies. Without them I'd still be staring at monitor and cursing. I removed X- and Z-trans from character's hip, which made him stay in place, but that wasn't enough. Mike was bumping along Y-axis -dont know if the BVH was modeled in stairs or was the BVH-file somehow corrupted. So I removed translations from Y-axis also. Now Mike was staying in place but was appr. 40 Poser-units up in the air. After a little thinking I decided to rescale Mike and his clothes (and bottle he was holding) to 200%. Now he was 20 units in the air. I could've rescale him even more to make him match the size the BVH-file meant (and thus solve the problem just by rescaling), but this would have make the textures look blurry. I decided not to use Photoshop-addon Genuine Fractals to make the textures larger. So it was time to use the Y-axis to place him on ground. Voila! there it was, a drunken Mike walking off the cliff :) I'm rendering the animation in vue d'Esprit, so I made the walkpath in that program. Using Poser's walkpath would've been easier, as I'm not that familiar with looking at wireframed objects. Using auto-scaling made Mike's shoulders go higher than his hair -that looked funny but not realistic at all. I tried to auto-scale Mike against the BVH-file and then adjust the shoulders to normal position from all keyframes (ie. frame 1 and then remove the rest of them keyframes). With a little more patience that would have also worked well. Thanks for helping me out of this, again:) -Hilt