Hi Westcat

I've had some good results with Marmoset Toolbag, but you do have to export your animation via fbx or alembic from Daz Studio, and sometimes there are issues with the exporter and the way Marmoset interprets the data (especially with blendshapes, if using only bone animation, it is not a problem) It is relatively cheap (I believe indie pricing is around 200 bucks) and it is fast (it is a pbr renderer). If you are willing to learn it UE4 is also blazing fast, but has a steep learning curve with textures and lighting (in my experience) Iray is very good, but it is slow. I have to do things like render in passes and composite in other programs. Here's a link to my vimeo page, where almost all of these were rendered in Marmoset

Glad to see some pretty good entries so far this year in the animation category, great job!

You are welcome Ader.

What are you exporting out to? a game engine or somewhere else? I use all of mine in motionbuilder, (since I'm a mocap guy) then bring back in to studio when needed to render (I've switched over to Marmoset toolbag for most things though).. The blendshape naming when exporting is a pain, but easily renamed when brought back into poser (just edit with wordpad to eliminate the prefix it puts on it)

I've tried to do the same in Poser, but sometimes morphs don't work at all, it categorizes things differently.. and on import, does all kinds of stupid stuff, like add info to the bones, so when saving as a pose file they don't work, and to edit them manually is a headache).

Here are some examples of tests (https://vimeo.com/user54654004)

Hi Ader

Unfortunately Poser's fbx import/export is very buggy, I have multiple tickets out to them on fbx issues.. You might want to try importing your Poser scene into studio and export it to fbx from there to see if it works. Their exporter is much better and one of the reasons I switched over to Studio for some things..

yes, very nice indeed, but it is what.. a 900+ phone and at least 15k suit.. ? and a lot of integration in the background, but still a nice step forward towards an "affordable" facial mocap solution.. (hopefully) You can use facial mocap in Poser already, although it is somewhat of a pain in the posterior.. I've done some tests in Poser https://vimeo.com/218984105 with the Hivewire horse and Dynamixyz's Performer software.. but it uses fbx and it has some issues to get around.

I put in a ticket with e-onsoftware, they say it is a known issue.. they are working on it with SmithMicro but no eta.. so in other words, we just have to sit tight or use earlier versions

First of all, I want to thank you for your responses, now to address some of your questions...

I'm targeting these motions specifically to poser by exporting the bone structure from Poser characters and bringing it into Motionbuilder, where the "industry standard" bone structure is mapped bone to bone to the poser model. The motion captured by the rig is mapped to these bones, cleaned up, and then are re-exported out as bvh and brought into Poser.

By doing this, you minimize some of the problems you can get by using generic bvh in Poser, such as skating. I have a couple of examples of both in Animation outlet. The latest one "troopers in tutu's" was not characterized, the bvh file was applied directly to the models. You can see a certain amount of skating... The second one "robot" was characterized, so the motion is a lot smoother...

I am planning on starting out with a lot of ambient and day to day motions, since it seems that those are the most lacking out there. And although I hadn't thought of putting the packages out in native poser "pose" files, that is only an extra step...so it wouldn't be a problem.

Since I don't own some of the other characters such as animedoll and Mayadoll, I might ask some of you to export a single frame Poser bvh so I can characterize them... but we can get to that later... :)

In the next few weeks I'll be putting out some test "freebie" packages using some of the free raw mocap data out there, so that I can work out any kinks beforehand.

Keep the questions and suggestions coming, I thank you for the input!

Bryan

Spike: Thanks! Bryan

Hmmm. Maybe I'm not getting this (or it is getting too late in the day... my brain is fried) At what point do I apply this script? I've done as PhilC suggested, saved the pose to Walkdesigner, applied it to another figure, created walkpath, still doesn't work.

I've applied the python script to the pose, before and after, same thing...still walks in place...

Maybe I need to go back to motionbuilder and see what choices are there....

thanks so far for all the suggestions, this is what makes these forums tick...

Bryan