Animation BIP walk cycles
polycounter lvl 14
Anyone know where i can buy or get hold of any decent bip / 3dsmax mocap walk cycles? can't seem to find anything online via google or turbosquid. I may have missed something and sorry if this has been asked before, though I did use TFSE
Replies
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/
More free mocap here. Though it took some time to receive the d/l link IIRC.
http://stockmoves.e-motek.com/
Here's where I go, offers many in multiple formats.
A large library of 3dsmax friendly .bvh files. They are smartly organized with a handy little excel doc. They also have 3dsmax specific help docs listed under the downloads. I've only glanced at them but they seem to be pretty solid, a bit wordy (yea by my monster post standards) but some good info.
Don't forget that biped has footsteps which are a pretty good base to start from, if you're in a pinch... Honestly nothing is easier to work with and gives better varied results than doing it by hand from scratch... 4 poses, 8 keys and you've got it.
http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml
http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/news.html
If you need to use mocap, motion mixer, in place mode and save/load .fig and .bip files are going to be your friends.
I found those but couldn't work out how to use the t3d c3d, and amc files with max. Is there an easy way of converting them? I have 3dsmax and maya on my work machine.
If i bring a bvh into the biped via motion capture panel of the biped rollout it distorts my mesh/skin wildly. I'm guessing its due to name missmatches? I tried creating another biped the same as my original, importing and resaving as BIP data but I still have the same problem. Argh, finding a simple yet realistic walk cycle shouldn't be so hard!
mocapdata.com only has a couple of files for walking which suck (though it claims to have thousands). The other sites are all formats which max doesn't like.
PS dont mind buying a walk cycle if there is a good enough one. Need something with a bit of personality for a side scrolling platform game. Turbosquid didn't seem to have anything good enough.
So what you do is;
- Before you load the .bvh file you put the biped in figure mode, save out a .fig file (just like you would a .bip file, disk icon).
- Load the .bvh file.
- Put it back in figure mode and load the .fig file you just saved out.
It should snap back and have all the motion applied to your biped at the correct scale once you take it out of figure mode.
Now cleaning up mo cap... that is a frame per key... and making it into something that works. That gets interesting.
Genious. I didn't know fig data held that kind of information. It fixed most of the issues except the fingers as the bones were removed when I loaded the BVH. I added the bones but couldn't weight to them so instead i weighted them to the hands as i dont need them anyway right now.
The other issue is that there seems to be invisible keyframes in trackview. I put keys either end of the timeline on the head (same key) and there's movement still and waves on the curve editor! Usuallly setting continuity to zero using BipedKeyer or manually resolves this but there really seems to be invisible keys. I have set the timeline to show all types and checked the neckbone for influence but the same issue is occuring all over the upper body and the same techniques used above on the root doesn't change this. What is happening?
You could load the .bvh file save out a.bip file, go back to your original biped, and load the .bip into motion mixer and filter out the hands.
That way you're not fighting with the .fig files.
As a general rule of thumb mo-cap won't include finger animation, if you're lucky you might get some wrist/palm action but don't hold your breath. Even if you where lucky enough to somehow get hand/finger mocap, it probably wouldn't load onto biped since the way it does IK/FK blending is very unique and most people have trouble getting wrist/palm animation to work.
About trackview/curve editor:
Biped has its own curve editor called workbench. The normal curve editor is useless to you. You get to it from the biped menu > Workbench.
Thanks again. I really need to look into learning my way around motion mixer. I actually spent a year abroad in California where I did a short graduate mocap course at UCI and now you mention it we never did any finger stuff. My experience with optical mocap was that it was extremely messy with loads of cleanup work (even with a good 'clean' capture).
http://freemotionfiles.blogspot.com/
Some more quick info about biped and MotionBuilder (separate app)
The layers in biped can be handy in helping clean up mocap by giving you a new layer to key over the top of the old. You can also capture a few key poses and some inbetweens using the copy/paste poses (I name them the frame they come from so they're ordered correctly and I get a sense of the timing) then clear out the mocap and use the poses as a base to start animating. You'll loose a lot of the subtle motion you get from key per frame mocap but it the results might be faster and better than some peoples attempt hand animation or cleaning up some really messy clips.
For mocap clean up and animation in general, MotionBuilder is the best I've found. There might be some other apps out there the film industry uses but for what I've done MotionBuilder is great.
It's nice because a handful of apps export to it and it has a lot of great features that after you use them for a while you begin to expect those features in every other rig/app and miss them when they're gone.
I also really like the way it handles animating two skeletons at the same time. You can link any part of either skeleton to the other. For example, person A is going to grab person B by the leg and throw them, no problem link the calf from B to the hand of A for a few frames then break it as they let go.
The layers in MotionBuilder are great, and the key reduction is top notch as it attempts to figure out what keys are important and preserve those, instead of just a brute force reduction like most other curve editors do. It does brute force which is sometimes all you need.