I am wondering what the current state of thinking about BVH files.

The collection of the 'Carnegie' BVH files (http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/) are possibly best known to be fairly useless for Poser users. The modern Poser characters have many more body parts than the simple model used by Carnegie.

The second problem with BHV files are that their model will probably have different body part size ratios (e.g. hip/waist ratio etc). Despite Poser's attempts to clean things up, 'slipping feet' remains on the more obviously visible effect, but it actually affect huge amounts of the motion (e.g. to touch the end of my nose would require different levels of rotation of my shoulder, if my forearm were a different length).

I have also seen (but not tried) software by Ockham and PhilC; but I am not altogether sure what problem they are attempting to fix; or how successful they are.

As the BVH file contains the 'OFFSET' details for each body part, what might be the effect of resizing the individual Poser character's body parts? Would this create movements which look the same as the original BVH intended?

Sorry if this is a long post, but would be grateful for any further insight.

I think attempting to change the scaling of body parts for a BVH file would be more frustrating, take longer, and be much harder than doing an animation one frame at a time.

The scaling would only be done at the 1st frame. Then, Poser's Figure would have the same proportions as the incoming BVH. If that is true, then perhaps the Poser Figure will move correctly (i.e. as intended by the original BVH). Thus,  no jerking or foot sliding.

I am not intending on changing the world here, I was just keen to watch some of these Carnegie data files within a Poser environment.

Otherwise, I agree with rokket, importing BHV data is generally not the best way to animate.

The carnegie library was available at sharecg in a form suitrable for Poser.  Have you tried those files ?

Thanks, but I believe those 'poser' format files (circa year 2008) were adjusted for the Poser "skeleton".  They don't work so well for other Figures.

Mr.Bones truebones.com has also released a free conversion of the CMU files, which I've found useful.

I don't think messing with your figure's scaling willl help.

I use lots of bvh files, but accept that they are likely to need considerable work, even the best mocaps will need some adjustments to suit the character. They are based on "average" people and take no account of superhero chests or amazon brassieres.

Editing the .bvh in wordpad or similar to make sure as many of the body part names match your figures hierarchy can help. After that it's down to the slog of dragging keyframes around in the graphs.

Keep a T-pose at frame 1 as a referrence to your figure's "normal" settings and the look through the graphs to see where the worst distortions appear, start with the hip and work outwards. Any spikes in the graph will show the first frames that need sorting.

Common problems like arms poking into the body can often be fixed with a blanket adjustment to the collars.

As a rule I delete any side to side keys for forearms and shins and force limits on bends to eliminate all backward bending, to my mind these are false data created by misinterpretation of shoulder or thigh twists. The flat rows of keys are then a guide to the sectors that need fixing in the joint above.