Preparing a BVH File in MotionBuilder

in this tutorial we're going to look at how to take a bb-8 file from your mocap system we're going to split it up into small individual moves we're going to clean up the moves you're going to reassemble it in a different order and we're going to send it back to Maya for doing whatever else you want to do with it so before we start let's just set up a folder in our asset browser here with all our data in so just right click somewhere in this part go add favorite path browse to the path I've got set up and you see now I've got a mocap tutorial folder here and in here are the two files I'm interested in working with this one is the BVH file that's come from a from the mocap system and this one is my rigged character which are sent through from wire so I'm just going to drag my BBH file into the window choose BVH import and here you can see is my mocap file now this is recorded at 100 FPS I'm going to change motion builders playback speed to pal because that's 25 frames per second which is what I want to finish up with and when we recorded the mocap we recorded at 100 FPS because it divides down nicely to 25 you can see there is quite a lot it's the initial tipos the mocap system were using automatically puts the T pose on frame zero to help you set motion build it up it's very important to have a T pose because that's how a motion builder recognizes the character once we press play you can see there's a little bit of just stood around waiting for a little while and then we get the dance any second now so to work with the BBH data first of all we have to characterize it because everything in MotionBuilder needs characterizing characterizing is just a posh way of saying of telling MotionBuilder which bones do what so the way to do that go down to our characters template folder here and we drag a character onto the scene and as soon as we do that we get our character definition panel come up here now it's very easy to set this up basically what we're doing is if you look at the different objects in the scene I'll just expand it up here in the Navigator but if I expand all of those expand branches you can see in here the entire structure of the bth file that came in you can see that each one is named well the names that MotionBuilder expects are listed here and you can see it expects them to be called hips left are plague and so on oh I've got one called hips in the bdh file but the naming convention that my mocap software uses is different so instead of a left up leg it's called left hip and I need to tell it what each one of those is now I can do that by dragging them from here into here the much easier way is over here in the character definition window so I'm going to double click on the hip bone and in going select hips and you can see now is is that the one called hips is connected to BBH hips which is a bone that's come from the BBH file a double-click on the right leg there and come and choose the right thigh bone and you can see it's automatically mirrored those because this mirror mode here is switched on which means i'm doing half the work to do this one here this one to here a little bit difficult to select them in the viewport sometimes and then to do the toes as you can see I've got toes on here I've got to expand up the feet view and choose the toes now if you've only got one toad like we have here the best thing to do is to actually use the the big toe so I'm going to double click on that one but notice now the views change as well I'm in this this close-up view so I'm now talking about the left toe here so I need to be careful to select the left toe on my character and you can see the both the left and the right toe been selected go back up to body view and look at the spine next so the first spine bone here needs to be double clicked and then I'll click the next spine bone don't be fooled and select the hips again it's a common mistake choose the spine bone here and then go into this little button here to expand out and put the rest of the spine bones in so the next spine bone is this one and then this one and then this one at the top quite often people call it the ribcage as part of the spine come back out that mode now that's set up so now I've got shoulders and arms so to get the shoulders I need to go into this little view here potential for two shoulder bones but I just need to pick the first one you've only got one and you'll notice it automatically does the opposite side as well and flips into the opposite view to show you that that's done double click on the right upper arm choose that one and forearm and the hand and then move up a little bit more we just got the neck to do so expand up the neck view and again I only need to use one neck bone so I choose the bottom one in the neck bone come out of there double-click the head I choose the head bone so you can see from the green button here that everything is gone well if your tea pose isn't quite accurate that might come up yellow but it's pretty good so we're happy with that now if I look back down here in my character definition you can see now that these have all been converted so left up leg is now left hip left leg is now left knee so this is the naming convention from my BBH file and this is the naming convention that MotionBuilder expects now what I don't want to have to do is I don't want to have to go through this process every time so I'm going to extract this as a naming template which I can use next time I bring a bdh file in to save all this backwards and forwards from the definition window to the skeleton so what I'm going to do first of all I'm going to characterize it like and do that in two ways I can lock the character here and just choose biped I can get exactly the same effect by taking the characterized box there lock up here in the definition window means exactly the same as characterized down here okay so now I've done that it goes to my control setup which I can do later on for cleaning up the animation and so on but in order to get this data out I'm just going to go extract naming template here just do okay and we'll see in the naming template now lists the names here that I'm going to be required to match over to the MotionBuilder names that I want to save this out so I can use it as a template so I'll just go to character make sure the character is selected down here then go file save selection and I'm going to call it m VN b th m VN because that's the motion capture system i used and BD h because it's BD h file and then i'll maybe Tim so anytime I've got a bdh file that was generated by the ambien system I can just bring this naming template back in and use it quickly so if I click Save they're just only save that I now have a my mocap tutorial folder right click and refresh directory there you can see I now have my naming template in there as well now I'm going to actually show you how to use that naming template so at this stage you don't need to do this but let's imagine I've moved on to the next BVH file so let's bring in a newbie view we'll bring in a BBH file yeah BBH import and now i want to use my naming template to characterize it as quickly as possible so I just drag my naming template into the scene FBX marriage no animation just okay that and then down here I've got a character and in my scene I've got my bvh file so I'm just going to click on the character I'm going to drag it onto the hips from my bdh file and click characterize there choose biped and now I've done exactly the same definition that I did with all that doing in frame to the definition panel over there so I've now have a characterized character now this is already called BVH because it was a BVH file that came in and I'm just going to call this character BVH as well so that they have the same name so click rename there choose BBH there just means I know which one is which now what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to do my mocap cleanup directly on the data here I'm going to do it on my actual character and the reason is is because I want to make sure that my character doesn't have intersections where the arms going to the body that my character's feet moves are tidied up and so on so that I know that this motion data works on that character that's the whole point of cleaning up so next thing to do is to bring the character in bringing in this character as a merge routing our animation on I go to display put x-ray on you can see she comes in with the skeleton she's pre skinned she skinned badly because I just did a quick job of it in Maya I never bothered to go on and paint the weights or whatever it's just a very rough skin so this character now also needs to be characterized if I go into my scene setup you can see that from Maya it's brought in a whole bunch of stuff I'm just going to rename these a little bit so it makes a little bit more sense so this one at the moment is called female if we look inside it it's got all of the maps for the materials on the character so I'm just going to right click on that one and rename that one as dancer mesh because it's the dancers mesh character five for some reason it's brought in an extra reference node so we just delete that once we don't need it just to keep the scene nice and clean and on this one here they're all called character six I can't do anything about that but what I can do is I can put them in a namespace which is the same thing as BVH here with the little : so right click on that and go add remove namespace I just add in a new namespace called unser make sure I'm on the add tab and apply to branch and then okay that and now you can see that each one of these is prefixed with the name space dancer just keeps everything neat and tidy can't get rid of the character six that's just something that came through from Maya when I set it into motion building so everything is named nicely why don't I have to do is to characterize my new character so I've got the hips here just go onto the characters template and because this has been sent from Maya specifically into motion builder the naming conventions are all correct I can just drag my character instead of dragging it into here I can drag it right onto the hips in the hierarchy click characterize it will recognize all the names and characterize it for me go into my characters roll out now I've got one called BBH I'm going to rename this one as dancer just to keep everything consistent I double click on dancer you can see it's characterized as expected what I also want to do though to enable me to do the editing is to create a control rig so click create control rig choose f ki K and now she has a control rig which enables me to do the animation now I'm going to I've got the dancer here I want to get the animation from the BVH file onto the dancer so I can actually control the dancer from a variety different sources at the moment she's controlled from the control rig which isn't doing anything but if I go up here and choose BBH I can actually control her from the BBH file and you can see now she does whatever to beat the H file does in order to edit that I want to plot out the animation from that onto the control rig that I've already got created so with my dancer character still selected down here I'm just going to go on to character settings you can see the input source here is BVH which is exactly the same as this source up here and then I'm going to choose plot character and plot that animation onto her control rig make sure they're both at the same speed to 25 fps for the like I've got for the rest of the scene and just go plot now think for a second and now I will have my control rig actually animated so I'm a good position now because the control rig has all the BVH animation data on it I can use the control rig for cleaning up the mocap data and cutting up and splicing up into bits and saving it out and that's what I'm gonna do next what I'm going to do first of all though is just clean my scene up a bit because I don't need this bdh skeleton in there anymore so I'm just going to go in I choose my bb-8 reference here right click and go select branches select everything that BVH reference has underneath it and then I'm going to right click again and choose delete just okay to that then it's asking me if I want to delete the character which is the characterization I've done on the BBA tree well yeah might as well delete that as well and yes to all on that that's going to clean out everything related to that original BVH file down here now you can see that I only have one character she's called dancer I still have my dancer mesh I still have the dancers skeleton hierarchy in there I have a control rig in here as well just going to expand up that control rig rename that one as dancer as well so that I know everything is consistent so my control rig is called dancer my character is called dancer mesh is called dancer mesh and all the skeleton associated to the dancer up here is also called dancer and everything is nice and consistent at this point it's a great idea to save so I'm going to do file save as straight into my folder and I'm going to call this she's called fashion model girl but I'm just going to call her dancer rig plotted as a as a name which means that I know this is ready to go for any cleanup and everything else so I think save there just click Save there and now in the next tutorial we're going to see how to cut that up into bits and start cleaning up the data

Channel: Ken Pitts

Views: 41,332

Keywords: MotionBuilder, Motion Capture, Mocap, BVH, Tutorial, MoBu, Cleanup, Characterization, Control RIg

Id: Ittde4Dlnp4

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2016