New bvh file conversion tool available

Cliona,

Anna was right - I'm not sure why, but one of the install packages doesn't always work right. When you unzip the download, there is a folder called vcredist_x86. Inside there is a program called vcredist_x86.exe. Run this, and then all should be ok.

If this doesn't work, just post again here, I am trying to check back fairly often...

Sorry for the confusion here, the vcredist_x86.exe has always just installed automatically when I tested it! I'll have a look at this when I get some spare time. Unfortunatly, I'm very busy right now setting up an animation shop in SL (Animazoo, Q A Business park).




James,

Could you send me the bvh file you are trying to load? You can email me at davedubuk at hotmail dot com. Poser 6 figures have been tested with no problem, so I'm curious to see what's gone wrong! Post a message in here to let me know when you have sent it...




Luth,

I will be posting a reply to your comments as soon as time permits!



; - Dave

Luth,

First off, I'd like to say I was a little put out when I saw your first post here. It seemed your first reaction to my producing a free resource for everyone to use was to make me out as some sort of bad guy who violates other peoples IP rights. Well, I'm not that person, and I replied saying as much.




I still do not agree with this standpoint - I'd maintain that finding free bvh files on the web and converting them to be SL compatible constitutes enough effort to call the final animation in SL your own work. So, provided the original creator is credited and has given permission what's wrong with selling them as your own work? That's exactly what they are!




The funny thing here is, you are actually helping make my point - converting animation files to a point where they look good in SL takes time, effort and a degree of skill.

At this point, I stopped and asked myself why would you be so scathing about other peoples efforts? So I looked you up in world, and, uhuh, you are an exsiting animation vendor.

Now it all starts to make sense - the herranging about IP rights, the scathing comments, the implication that of motion capture anims are not worth bothering with - I would suggest your real interest is not in protecting mocap companies IP rights, more an interest in 'protecting your own business'. Which is understandable, but you have to realise from my point of view I had to (quite unfairly) defend my software and my position on IP rights as a result.

On the subject of establishing of a fair price for mocapped animations:




What are you saying here? That mocap files are not already sold in SL? That is not true - in fact, I've never seen a decent dance animation that WASN'T made from mocap data! So, actually, a fair price for mocapped animations HAS already been established. Just saying...




Right, well if you check out the animation centre I'm setting up ( Animazoo, QA Business Park (32, 194, 22) ) You will notice that all of the animations give credit to the original creator in the description. And yes, I have permission to re-sell them, although I'm giving them away for now. So, with all due respect, please 'pester' someone else!

; - Dave

I'm not sure what posts you are reading, if she sent you nasty PMs or something, but I don't see any of this in her posts here. I'm thinking you're just being oversensitive and reading into neutral comments. I mean, it is the case that Luth's first reaction was suspicion. However, you have to realize that you're walking into waters where many scammers operate and copyrighted work gets stolen frequently.

Ultimately, you needn't feel attacked, as though Luth is accusing you of stealing the work of others. She's not saying that at all; she is pointing out that your tool can be used by others to steal.

All she (and I) is really hoping for is a confirmation from you that you are respectful of the pros and cons of this tool existing, because thus far your posts have been a bit defensive, only accepting the pros and naively denying the cons. Sort of a "don't know your own strength" kind of situation. You asked about the advantages of a software company realizing their work can be used to reverse-engineer the work of others; there's no direct financial advantage, but rather an indirect "social" advantage from the moral clarity when you are aware of all sides of an issue.

Honestly this isn't a big deal, you just got defensive rather quickly.

Not only devensive but now in full attack mode.

I've reread my comments and not a single one was "scathing." Trust me, you'd know if it was.

1. I never said you did, nor attacked your for selling mocap files with the assumption that you made them yourself. What I infact said was that I hope that you and anyone who uses this tool does not.

2. This has nothing to do with "protecting" my business. Anyone who knows my work, or even reads the fashion blogs will tell you my primary interest is in fashion poses. My customers like my sense of style and my extreme attention to the clothing and skin mesh. Baddly fixed mocap files haven't hurt me in the past 3 years and I don't see that changing.

3. You say that if someone has permission and credits the origional creator then what's the problem? I've said there isn't a single problem with that. The problem happens when they don't get permission and not a single mention of the origional creator. See? Here we agree. Yet instead you attack me by saying I'm an selfish and elitist content creator. So really according to you I'm not allowed to have an opinion, even one that agrees with yours, because I happen to run a business. What about Johan? He sells way more dances then I do is he selfish also?

4. What part of: "When animations were first introduced in June '04, people downloaded a bunch of anims and mocap files to put out as freebies to deter this sort of thing, " says there are no mocap files out there? People gave away free mocap anims IW to deter people from selling them, as you can't make a profit on something that is already given away. The community was much smaller back then so you'd think it would have worked, but it didn't because people sell mocap files with NO mention of the origional creator.

5. Taking the comment: "but for all the animations with feet turned upside down, you have to wonder how many bother to," out of context. Yes it probably does take work to fix the anims to look right, but not as much to create them from scratch. But by the amount of animations sold IW with the feet turned upside down, it doesn't seem like very many do much more then stick them in a pose ball and put it out for sale.

6. Yes there are decent dances out there made from non-mocap data. The problem is is that you never know which are and which aren't because everyone (minus Dave of course) doesn't bloody give credit to the origional creators. As an animator, why shouldn't that piss me off? As a consumer why shouldn't that piss me off?

lol just a quick correction of facts: although this may be technically correct (I have no idea) I believe you may be confusing me with one of the many animators with a large portfolio of dances for sale, whereas I just have a couple of couples dances.

I own a lot of dances I bought from three of the largest and most respected animations sellers, and I have a lot of duplicates. Many duplicates of freebies, too. Clearly most of these come from motion capture, or from some other common source. Only Owenimations mentions that they are motion captures, and even he doesn't say he didn't make the capture, and he doesn't credit the source.

That's my point

Johan - not confusing you with anyone else. I saw your set up on animation isle the other day. You sell 1 more couples dance then I do It was late so I typed it wrong. You have more animations then I do, mine are mostly poses - like 200+ of them.

Here's a solution... LEARN HOW TO ANIMATE.

whoah, someone needs to simmer down

First off, reading back, I can see maybe I did get a bit defensive before, and so I'll apologise for that. In retrospect, I felt I was trying to explore new ways of animating, and instead of getting the encouragement I was looking for, all I received critisism for enabling piracy. But anyway, I'm not trying to rake up old ground here. I'm sure everyone's views on the subject have had sufficient airing!

All I really wanted to say is that I have continued developing bvhacker, and it is now a fundamental part of my animation toolchain - for example, no other bvh editing app makes it so easy to centre your animation, set the ground height and add the T stance just before upload - it's a 2 second job! The new version has a couple of other very usefull functions, like the abdomen fix which is for when you have used Poser to convert a 23 joint animation to a 24 joint animation and the back bends in the wrong place.

I'm thinking of releasing the new version, as I find it extremely useful, but from past comments I'm not sure anyone else will! Would anyone be interested in downloading a copy if I updated the site?

If you want to see the results I'm getting with my current toolchain, check my animation shop at:

Animazoo, QA Business Park (32, 194, 22)

Look for the animation names that start with 'Animazoo' - they're the most recent ones!

Dave Bellman

I would be interested in seeing the new version up.

Me too. Pleeease.

Same here.

wow - quick replies!

ok, here it is:

http://davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/

enjoy!

Oh, and do give credit to the original creators of any animations you might distribute in SL!

; - Dave


footnote: I'm officially opening the Animazoo animations shop on Saturday. I'll be adding some more animations to the first range!

Animazoo, QA Business Park (32, 194, 22)

Dave--
Great. Thanks.


Much appreciated

My first experiments with this tools are a bit dissapointing. Some related to the tool, some with the bvh format. Loading a bvh is great. Immediatly you see the animated figure. Indeed almost any bvh will do, which is great.

My main issue with the tool itself are the frequent crashes. Especially deleting nodes, but also renaming. Tried to delete fingers, resulted in multiiple end nodes, which cant be good.
Tried to convert a Poser animation which upload fine into SL gave me an error when trying to SLify. (insufficient joints). All joints are there, just don't see En Site to the hands).

Now the main problem, not related to this tool), many bvh just have more joints than our poor SL Avatars. I have seen a spine with 9 joints. Many of them have fingers (if only SL...), but those can be deleted as they are at the end. But how to handle a joint ' in between'. I have seen legs with 5 joints instead of 3. Which one to delete ? and after deletion, the animation will look very differently. Maybe some more experienced users can help me with this?

Still I believe this tool is REALLY useful tool. Renaming joints, although simple enough already helps really a lot.

except...
Directory Listing Denied
This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

?

The new website seems to be down, Dave. I'm getting HTTP Error 404 when I click on the link to the new site.

There was a problem with ftp access to my server last night - nicely timed for my releasing a new version of bvhacker! Thanks for that streamline.co.uk!

Anyway, they have fixed it this morning, and the site is up again.

Vent:
I suspect the problem could be avoided by deleting the end site to the fingers first, and working your way back up the skeleton. Make sure that when you do this sort of thing, you don't leave any joints 'dangling' without an end site. It's important to realise bvh files were not designed to be 'hacked about' in the way bvhacker allows!
I dont' have time to fix the bug itself right now, but if you could send me the bvh file that causes the crash, and detail the steps to make it happen again, I'll have a look at it soon.

With regards the question of which bones in the leg to remove - that's a tricky one, as you will lose all the rotation data for whichever joint you remove. It is unlikely to ever look completely 'right'. But, if you wanted to try anyway, delete the joint with the least amount of movement on it (watch the sliders!) and then adjust the remaining joint's x y z offsets to match the SL skeleton and see how it looks.

I'll consider putting a 'merge joints' function in the next release to get see if we can around this.

Good luck!

; - Dave

First of all I need to say, I was not looking at the latest version you just posted. I thought I did, but I did not. I tried installing the new version this morning but got an error about the C++ libs, guess I need to remove the old ones. Will check it later today.

Thanks for advice about removing the joints bottom to end.

About joining and splitting joins. Isnt this basically the abdomen issue ? I was wonderig if the same philosopy could be applied there.

I'll play some more tonight.

Now I wonder, apart from the frame zero issue. Arent all animators having these issues with bvh files ? Lets say I buy a figure from one source, I cant animate it with a bvh I get from another just because the joints have different names. I think this tool, maybe in a more advanced stage, could be of use for more than just SL.

Erm, a bit embarrassing really - the version of bvhacker that I posted last night had a tiny bug in it. Everything works fine until you upload the bvh file. SL (unlike many bvh reading programs) cannot handle the line starting 'Frame time' unless both words start with a capital. Grrr.

Anyway, it's all fixed now, and the updated version (v1.2.01) is at
http://davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/ as before.

If you downloaded either last night or this morning, I'd suggest uninstalling then re-installing the app.

If you did make a bvh file with bvhacker 1.2 between last night and this afternoon, let me know, 'cos any problems are very easily fixed!

Vent:
Yes, it's a similar problem to the abdomen thing, only leg joints bend and twist in different directions, which presents a real headache when you start considering joints with different joint rotation orders. It all gets very messy with matrices, quaternians and other nasties that make my head hurt! I'll keep the idea in mind, and if I find time in the future I'll have a serious look at implementing the 'merge joints' thing.

Dave, I dont even want to think about those calculations

hmm, downloaded the latest version, running XP Pro, every time I try and run it, it blows up and gives an error of - The handle is invalid.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Hi Wildthrust,

Sorry to hear that, it's a new error on me! I thought I had it sorted, I tested bvhacker by installing on four different computers! Heigh ho...

When you installed bvhacker, can you remember if the 'VC runtime libraries' were installed before bvhacker?

If not, try this:



Failing that the error message (invalid handle) may suggest that there is a problem with your OpenGL drivers. You could try making sure you have the latest set for your graphics card.

If neither of these solutions work, please post back here with details of your machine (Windows version, processor, graphics card etc etc) and I'll see what I can do.

: - Dave

Before looking at the video drivers, just try a reboot, and don't use SL or other OpenGL programs (like Poser) before starting bvhhacker. Sometimes different OpenGL programs don't like eachother .