I have taken the entire Carnegie Mellon University Human Motion Database which includes over 2600 animations and converted them so that they will work in Poser.  I will be releasing between 400 - 500 per week over at ShareCG. 

Read about how to get it and how to use it over at my blog:

http://mojodallas.blogspot.com/

or visit the site:

http://www.mojodallas.com/

These are some amazing animations capturing all kinds of human motion.  The CMU Graphics Lab was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to do this study of human motion and capture it within their asf format.  I converted it to BVH with Poser bones and joints with a Python Program.

Enjoy!

wow! how were you able to convert them for poser?

Well this should be really useful to many, and with hopes that the models you spoke about in your blog were free and not, well you know, shared without permissions.  Thanks for all your hard work, anxious to see the animations.  Sharen

Thanx MoJo!

How great! Thanks so much for sharing. 
Downloaded a couple to try out.

So far I tried to import with the Sadie cartoon figure, P4 female, and with both it hung Poser on loading the BVH.  On the LoRes girl from  3DU it worked.  Will try all other figures see what works what doesn't.

I have a free BVH Player named GG18bvhPlayer and it doesn't play with that, giving an error of Incorrect format in line2.

Will keep trying, but sure do appreciate the effort you went to. :)

BTW  loved your music!   Your blog is very informative and will be very useful to many here.  :)

I was just thinking about that the other day... and it's even better that they are free for all use! Nice to see a benefit from our tax dollars! Thank you for going to all the trouble of making them Poser friendly!!!

Hi mojoDallas,
Thank you so much for the amazing gifts. I used Simon G2 and it took a few minutes to come in but once it did it was very clean.
  You did a terrific job on these.
I really enjoyed your music.
cheerio  lululee

Has anyone tried them with v4?

I haven't tried them with V4 yet but I found that these BVH motions work well with Simon (the P7 male) but when I apply them to the Poser 4 male (which is what I use whenever I download BVH files) his head is always looking upwards. Other than that I have no problems with these BVH motions. I'll be trying it on V4 and M3 later this evening to see if there are any problems with any body part movement. Thanks mojoDallas for converting these and making them available to the Poser community.

I brought the file in on SimonG2. the file I brought in was 4500 frames.
I took the first 350 frames, saved it to the library as a 350 frame pose file then applied that to V4 and it worked very well. Some slight changes needed but very few.
cheerio  lululee

cool, looking forward to going home this evening and trying them on v4..

thanks

Very nice on the motions, but I only have 2 issues:

1. it would be nice if instead of just numbered files, that you could label what each motion set actually is instead of having to sift through each and every one

2. some of the movements are kinda jerky like the arms and hands shaking rapidly

Each Zip File has a text document that describes all the files in terms of what they are.  The numbering convention is from the actual database conversion.

Also, I have not seen the jerking you mention, but, in any case it would have been what the data was in the database.  What animations had the jerking.  I will take a look at them and make sure that something I might have done in the conversion didn't introduce an unwanted motion.

It will take a few weeks to get all the files out there on ShareCG.  I suggest that you dump the text file into a spreadsheet or database and then you can search, sort and catagorize the animations.  I am finding that it this is almost too many animations to deal with.

This is a repost of some stuff I learned a while back, after much desk-biting frustration, trying to import BVH.

They're not all my ideas - many have been trawled from long reading of the Poser forums. I'm assuming a basic knowledge of Poser and how to run python scripts.

1. If you haven't already, download and install the BVH Mixer python and Smoother pythons. Links to the latest versions can be found in the Renderosity Python Scripting forum.

2. Select Posing Camera and Skip Frames on the timeline. Bring your chosen character into the studio.

3. Check Figure/Use Limits. This removes a lot of the shoulder-hunching you get in BVH downloads.

4. Run BVH Mixer. Pick a BVH file to import. Unless your figure will be jumping around, check drop to floor. Press Go! and wait for the script to process the BVH. Close the python window and play the animation to see how it looks.

Next comes the tricky bit...!

1. If any limbs, etc seem to be at a strange angle, select the body part, click one of the arrows in the parameter dials and select Graph.

2. Make sure your graph is set to one of the joint rotations - bend, up/down, etc.

3. Select all keyframes. You do this by stretching the graph out so it's showing the full range of keyframes, then clicking and dragging on a clear spot in the graph window. Drag all the way to the end of the graph. Now shift-click in the blacked-out area, and drag all the way to the other side of the graph. The whole thing should now be black. With large animations, the graph can revert to unselected if you swing the cursor back onto it. Avoid this by clicking on a blank bit of the user interface once the cursor is off the graph.

4. Ctrl-click on the graph. Watching your figure carefully, move the selected keyframes up or down, till the figure's pose looks more natural. You may well need to do this for all rotations of all offending bodyparts, but after a little practise this takes only a few minutes.

5. Many free BVH downloads have glitches in them, where the figure will suddenly jerk for no reason. Find the affected bodypart(s) and look at the graph. It's often possible to cure the glitch simply by deleting the problem keyframes.

6. Although the figure is now in a more natural pose, it will often be trembling and jittery. You can cure this by running the Smoother script a couple of times. This removes any redundant "noise" keyframes.

TIP: before you do this, select the hip, go to the Object menu and tick Lock Actor. This stops the "pirouette" effect sometimes seen when hip rotations are smoothed.

1. If the BVH motion looks really jittery, it may be easier to skip step 10, and use Animation/Resample key frames. Setting this to 4 or 8 tends to get all the bumps out. Again, make sure you lock the hip first, particularly if the figure turns around during the animation,

FOR PAL COUNTRIES: Many BVH downloads seem to be for 30 FPS video, and look a little slow when applied to 25 FPS movies. To cure this, you need the brief help of a calculator.

1. Click somewhere on your figure's body. (You need to do this or you may end up retiming the Posing Camera, which is pointless!)

2. Go to Animation/Retime Animation.

3. With your calculator, take the length of the animation in frames and DIVIDE BY 1.2 - enter this number into the lower-right box in the Retime Animation window. Press OK. The animation will now be at its proper speed.

4. Enter this same number into the of window on the timeline, and press ENTER. You're asked, "Are you sure you want to delete some of your keyframes?". Click OK. The redundant keyframes at the end of the animation will now be deleted.

You can now save this BVH in the pose folder of your choice.

16)  To make a good thumbnail, use ctrl-g to remove the ground. Drag the preview window till it's just about square. Use the timeline pointer to get a frame that shows off a key movement of the animation. Use the posing camera to get a good angle, where the figure almost fills the preview window.

1. Press + in the library, and enter a name for your animation. Answer "no" when you're asked if you want to include morph channels, or the file will be huge. Make sure you select "Multi frame animation", and enter the number of frames into the "End frame" box.

Hi all,

How to apply the bvh file to a G2 figure?  (file>import?)

Thanks in advance

Yep, File>import Bvh. Have your figure loaded first. Leave all the boxes that pop up as selected. As it complains that it can't find certain body parts just click ok one by one and all the frames will load.

Then use some of Maxfield's excellent pointers to fix things.

 I also  use something called BVHacker ( made for 2nd Life I think -do a google search) to clip out the parts I need and save as anothername .bvh and maybe save in the pose library.

Hi masha,

Thank you for your reply.
"Maxfield's excellent pointers to fix things"
Sorry, I can't find it.

Where could I get this?

Heh,  It's in this thread just above your first post.

One of those days huh? :)

Sorry, I missed it. Thanks a lot, masha!!!
:D