[Please forward as desired.]

(It was suggested to me that I should post this to at least one Renderosity forum, so here we go.  Although this BVH release is for Daz characters, clearly it should be possible to use the BVH files in any application that supports these characters, including Poser.)

I'm pleased to announce the most recent BVH conversion of the Carnegie-Mellon (CMU) motion capture library.  The new conversion is for the Daz (daz3d.com) 3rd-generation and 4th-generation characters such as Aiko3, Aiko4, Victoria3, Victoria4, Michael3, Michael4, and so on.  Over 2500 separate BVH files are available, with an index.

You can get the files at:
http://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/daz-friendly-release

Or you can go to www.cgspeed.com and follow the Motion Capture link from the left-side navigation bar.

All of the files are free, and they're bundled into a small number of ZIP files so that you can get everything fairly quickly.

Other people have previously done releases of the CMU motion dataset for the Daz characters or "for Poser", however sometimes there are significant problems using these earlier releases.  This new "official cgspeed.com" release was created via a full retargeting in Motionbuilder, and is designed to import seamlessly into programs like Daz Studio when you use any of the Daz gen3 or gen4 characters.

Two training videos are available (in HD):
  Part 1: http://www.vimeo.com/13777740
  Part 2: http://www.vimeo.com/13777422

I recommend that you watch them full-screen if possible.

This Daz-friendly release is actually two separate releases: a "primary" and a "secondary" release.  The difference between these two releases is explained in the second training video, and in the full READMEFIRST file of the primary release.  Generally you should start with the primary release, and only get the secondary release if you think you need it -- see the second training video for an example.

A partial extract from the READMEFIRST file of the primary release is below.

Thanks to John Lukasiewicz for doing the initial heavy lifting on the Motionbuilder Python script that enabled this release.  No thanks to Autodesk for having bugs in their BVH export code, which I had to correct around.  :-O

AFFILIATION AND DISCLAIMER: I (Bruce) am not affiliated with and don't speak for Carnegie-Mellon University, Daz Productions, Autodesk, or Smith Micro, and they don't speak for me. :-)

Bruce Hahne
hahne at io dot com

This READMEFIRST file accompanies the primary Daz-friendly BVH
conversion release of the Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) Graphics
Lab Motion Capture Database.  See "Where to find stuff" at the bottom
of this file for where to get the BVH conversion and/or the original
CMU dataset.

This is the third major conversion in an occasional series of
conversions of the CMU BVH data into various forms designed to be easy for hobbyists to use.  The history so far is:
  2008: First Motionbuilder-friendly release
  2009: 3dStudio Max biped-friendly release
  June 2010: Second (slightly improved) Motionbuilder-friendly release
  July 2010: Daz-character-friendly release

This release is a set of BVH files designed to work seamlessly with
the 3rd-generation (gen3) and 4th-generation (gen4) prerigged
characters from Daz (www.daz3d.com).  These characters include, for
example:
  Aiko3 Victoria3 David3 Michael3 SP3
  Aiko4 Victoria4 SP4

I've spot-tested the BVH files from this Daz-friendly conversion in
Daz Studio 3. In theory they should also work with the Daz gen3 and
gen4 characters within any release of Poser or Carrara, however as of
July 2010 I haven't tested with either of these packages.

ADVANTAGES AND FEATURES OF THIS RELEASE:

• The BVH files are entirely retargeted to the Daz gen3 and gen4
   skeletons, and should import seamlessly onto these Daz characters
   with no need to mess around with joint renaming or post-import
   rotation corrections. If you've struggled in the past to use BVH
   files to animate Daz characters, you should give this dataset a try
   or watch the training video - it's very fast to use this BVH release
   with the Daz characters.

• Unlike other attempts at releasing Poser-friendly or Daz-friendly
   conversions of this dataset, this conversion has run the files
   through an actual retargeting algorithm in Motionbuilder.  Other
   attempts at Poser-friendly releases that I've seen contain massive
   joint-snarl and rotation-snarl problems.  This release should avoid
   most of these problems, since Motionbuilder did the heavy lifting.

• Index files: As always, the release includes consolidated indices
   that list the motion filenames and their descriptions.  Both
   spreadsheet and word processor friendly index files are available.

• This Daz-friendly release is based on the latest
   Motionbuilder-friendly BVH release, which provides better leg and
   neck rotation corrections than the 2008 release.  The result is that
   when you animate Daz characters using this Daz-friendly release, you
   typically don't get the problem of the character's head being bent
   down at a severe angle.

• Preserves the 120fps of the original CMU dataset - you get every
   frame from the original capture (both the good and bad data...), not
   a downsampled 30fps version.

CAVEATS:

• The original CMU motion capture data was recorded several years ago
   in a non-profit academic environment by people who weren't necessarily
   experts at operating the motion capture system. The data was never
   cleaned and contains a wide variety of joint-flipping problems
   characteristic of "dirty" motion capture data, when the Vicon
   joint-tracking software makes an incorrect guess about how a joint
   has actually rotated. All releases of the CMU data preserve these
   joint-flip problems in all of their (ugly) glory. Typically the only
   way to get rid of them is manually clean the data, which is of
   course a time-consuming and tedious process. Some of the capture
   data is quite good, but other captures, particularly earlier in the
   numeric series of directories, have a lot of joint-flip problems.

• Because MotionBuilder 2009 has a hip rotation BVH export bug, I've
   run this release of the Daz-friendly data through a hip-correction
   script that, for the most part, does an excellent job of undoing
   Motionbuilder's bug. However, occasionally this script introduces
   foot-slip / floor-contact problems - see for example animation
   directory 144, file 144_05.bvh. If you discover an animation in
   this release that you don't like due to foot-slip problems, you
   might want to take a look at the "Daz-friendly, hip-uncorrected" BVH
   release, since I'm also releasing the full set of Daz-friendly BVH
   files PRIOR to application of the hip-correction algorithm. The
   "hip-uncorrected" release is at cgspeed.com, as usual.

• This release provides 120fps BVH data, as do all of the BVH releases I've done so far. Generally you'll want to set your animation software to 30fps (for NTSC), 25fps (for PAL), or 24fps (for film) after you've done the BVH import, since these fps rates are what most video-editing software will expect.

• These BVH files are not designed to work with non-Daz characters
   such as E-frontier / SmithMicro characters, Miki2, RuntimeDNA
   characters, etc. I also don't know if they'll work cleanly with
   lesser-known Daz figures such as The Freak, The Girl, etc.

• Since it's impossible to test 2600 different BVH files on a dozen
   different Daz characters within 3 different applications (Daz
   Studio, Carrara, Poser), there are plenty of combinations that might give
   you "interesting" or undesired results. However, work so far within Daz
   Studio has given positive results.

• Blender users: I have yet to see a successful import of a Daz
   character into Blender, and Blender uses a "z axis up" world
   coordinate system that makes life even more miserable for
   converting a variety of data, so please don't hold your breath
   hoping that this Daz-friendly release will be usable in Blender any
   time soon.

USAGE RIGHTS:

CMU places no restrictions on the use of the original dataset, and I
(Bruce) place no additional restrictions on the use of this particular BVH conversion.

Here's the relevant paragraph from mocap.cs.cmu.edu:

Use this data! This data is free for use in research and commercial
projects worldwide. If you publish results obtained using this data, we would appreciate it if you would send the citation to your  published paper to jkh+mocap@cs.cmu.edu, and also would add this text to your acknowledgments section: "The data used in this project was obtained from mocap.cs.cmu.edu. The database was created with funding from NSF EIA-0196217."

Gee thanks! Now I have even more work to do! LOL! Thanks... no... really... I mean it! :tt2:

 Thanks for the heads up!  You might want to swing by the Freestuff forum, too ;)

Thank you for the info.  Sharen

Thanks very much for your work on this. 

Cheers

Yeah, so far I've imported the very first two and the last one in Poser Pro 2010 on Mike 3 and they all suffer from 90 degree side turns on the eyes and 119 degree bends on the right and left buttocks. Also, the left arm appears to be bent backwards 90 degrees at the elbow on the first one.

So there's an older BVH list for Poser then?

Wonder why you have to download cookies to get the files and there are over 30 cookies for each one? Just curious.

 Miss Nancy, your anim totally made my morning :)

Quote - Yeah, so far I've imported the very first two and the last one in Poser Pro 2010 on Mike 3 and they all suffer from 90 degree side turns on the eyes and 119 degree bends on the right and left buttocks. Also, the left arm appears to be bent backwards 90 degrees at the elbow on the first one.

Hmm not to bash  Freebie but after some experiments in DAZ studio with the Mike model from various generations
I got several Crashes of DAZ Studio
I must conclude that these "DAZ Friendly" BVH files are largely useless

As I suspected they would be.

BVH is a DEAD Vestigial format
that is too inconsistent and DAZ Studio Handling
of BVH is still quite poor,

which is why I dropped BVH in favor of animated PZ2 files  for My marketplace products.

I recommend that DAZ users stick to aniblocks or animated PZ2.

Cheers
 

Attached Link: http://www.mojodallas.com/

I tried some of the Daz friendly BVH files on a Hiro 3 in Poser 10 Pro.  After import the hourglass appeared and it was still working an hour later.

Basically there appears to be one frame of data for every K in file size which means a 7432K file is around 7400 frames, more or less. This takes quite a bit of time to load. An hour is kinda excessive though. I would CTRL ALT Delete and start over myself. But frankly after trying 3 of them only to see the severe bending errors in the buttocks, eyes and left arms I think they're a waste of my time. There are too many corrections to do by hand.

Quote - Basically there appears to be one frame of data for every K in file size which means a 7432K file is around 7400 frames, more or less. This takes quite a bit of time to load. An hour is kinda excessive though. I would CTRL ALT Delete and start over myself. But frankly after trying 3 of them only to see the severe bending errors in the buttocks, eyes and left arms I think they're a waste of my time.

This is interesting - it sounds as if Poser may still have issues with the import of larger BVH files.  I tested one of the longer BVH files under Poser 6 (2005), and Poser did indeed choke, or at least appear to lock up.  I wrote that off to Poser 6 being 5 years old and not realistically designed for animation.  However as we can see from the first training video that I created, Daz Studio is able to import even one of the larger BVH files (~40 seconds, 120fps, so about 4800 frames) in perhaps 20 seconds.  It's fast enough that I'm able to simply talk through it in realtime in the training video.  There's no reason why any program should need an hour to import a 7400-frame BVH file.  It's just simple joint rotation data.  Motionbuilder is able to do the import in a few seconds.

Based on the comments of people who are seeing bad joint rotations, it also sounds as if the post-processing of the BVH data by each program (Poser vs. Daz Studio) is different.  The Daz-friendly conversion that I just released was created by retargeting onto the skeleton produced by an FBX export of Daz Aiko3 out of Daz Studio, so it's not too surprising that the results work reasonably well - at least for A3 - in Daz Studio.  I had hoped that they would similarly work within Poser, but perhaps it really does require one set of BVH files for Poser users and a separate set for Daz Studio users, even when the underlying skeleton is the same.  That shouldn't be the case, but I don't know what Poser tries to do with the BVH data once it's imported.

What will be interesting is to see what the results are in Carrara 7 Pro - in theory I should be receiving a copy of that on the CD when my next issue of 3DWorld arrives in the mail.

Bruce
hahne at io dot com

I had no problems loading the 144_34.bvh at 5,882K and it certainly didn't take an hour. I suspect that the issue of the hour long load time was system specific and not Poser specific because we both used Poser Pro 2010. I used the 64 bit version on Windows 7 64Bit and they loaded but the rotations were off for Mike 3. I guess I can try again with Aiko and see how well she does.

Ok I tried the first BVH in the first file that I also used on M3 on Aiko and the buttocks weren't bent out of whack but the left forearm and eyes are still screwed up. Used 01_06.bvh on her and it seems ok except again, for the eyes. Also I reccommend turning on limits when importing these.

Not sure about system specific.  I have hundreds of other BVH files that import quickly.  I tried a 1500 frame BVH from another source that imported in about 10 seconds.

Regarding the quality, the old versions of these on ShareCG were practically useless in Poser.  One of those I loaded, I think it was 1_9 was a decent walk, but with a number of problems.

Bruce, I have struggled for many days with BVH files, prior to your update. I gave up on this.

Maybe I give it a new try if it is possible to use a Daz skeleton in my own created characters. I can build a character around this skeleton without changing it.

Is there a good source for BVH or pose animations for Poser?

wolf, thx fr lnk to animeeple.  does one hafta assign all body parts one-by-one, or will it recognise
them all automatically, as poser and carrara do?  I've tried to import bvh but it always sez
"there are some items in the file that are not ready to import", then it fails to import the bvh.

p.s. jen: glad ya liked it!

I'm not really fond of Ameeple. Ever since installing it it seems to want to run on a lot of web pages I load and I keep getting popups asking if I should let it run.

Quote - wolf, thx fr lnk to animeeple.  does one hafta assign all body parts one-by-one, or will it recognise
them all automatically, as poser and carrara do?  I've tried to import bvh but it always sez
"there are some items in the file that are not ready to import", then it fails to import the bvh.

Hi I will be Frank.
"animeeple" has only proved useful to me as  Free BVH Viewing app
so you dont have to actually fire up poser/DS/Carrara etc just to see what some BVH File named "01_06.bvh" ,actually does.

Other than that , it  is basically unusable on OSX at least.

Cheers

So no other good sources for BVH's or other animations for Poser?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=608939&ebot_calc_page#message_608939