Hello,

I'm working on an animation project for a dance show, in which there will be a screen for video on the scene ; We have captured bvh animations with a kinect and IPISoft, which are working well, except the usual foot problems. The sequence i'm working on is a dance sequence, something like a ballet with skeletons dancing, fixed camera and animated lights. So, a long sequence with a lot of characters moving in the same environment.

I'm not an animator and don't have a background in CGI. I'm working on PP2012 since a year now, mostly for still images. I'm still learning everyday and this (animation) is really new for me.

What i don't know how to do now is to merge different animations correctly ; I have tried to put, for example, a walk designer after one of my sequences to make my character go out of the scene, and it's working more or less, but was a lot of work for such a minor job. So i'm asking myself, is poser the good software to do that ?

Should i find another way to merge my BVH files, before the import in poser ? I've heard motionbuilder is great for that job, and i would love to learn that software (if i find the time) but maybe i'm just too much ignorant and stay in poser for that would be ok too. If people here already had to work on the same kind of thing, what was your workflow and how did you handled working with mocap bvh files ? Or maybe you will say that it would take me years to be able to do such a job ?

I apologize for my terrible english, i do my best !

Thanks in advance, your help already has been precious for me on this forum, i have made things i couldn't do without community support, so again, many thanks renderosity people !

There are two main ways of joining animations. One way is to leave a small gap between them which poser will bridge by interpolation. That can then be tweaked as needed. The other way is to make sure then first frame of the new animation is the same pose as the final frame of the previous. There are a few bvh libraries that use a fixed start and end position to make that easier.

Another option is to make your sections long enough to put together in a video editor (cheap or free) and use cuts or transitions between them. a change in camera position makes that easier visually.

I think Poser will load a bvh file starting at the current frame. If that doesn't work you can load the bvh file, and save as a pose file. Then load the pose files.