New bvh file conversion tool available

Got my first converted BVH into SL! Took the one handed sword swing from the Male Action Pack for Poser from The Forge, removed the weapons, eyeballs, fingers and toes, and adjusted the End Sites to match the original SL head, hands and feet, and Voila! (after a _lot_ of saves before crashes and a couple of direct text editings of the BVH file to fix srewed up skeletons; definitely bvHACKER) - it works! Very viscious looking. Now for the two-handed sword... Heeheehee

Whichway

You might find it easier to do that using a text editor on the .bvh file. If I understand what you're saying ...

Hi Whichway,

First, thanks for your feedback, is always appreciated!

Sorry to say I'll not be releasing the source for bvhacker - I had considered going Open Source with it when I first wrote it, but decided for various reasons not to in the end.

However, if you could give me steps to reproduce the problem, and were happy to trust me with one of your animations I could have a look myself. I can promise to delete your animation once I'd finished.

With regards, text entry for the slider positions - that's not a bad idea, although in my experience SL doesn't actually use the translation offsets for the endsites. You may want to try uploading your anims with any old values for the end sites to see if it makes any difference...

Finally - glad to hear you got a good result in the end! Sorry to hear you had to edit the bvh file manually - again, send me the steps to reproduce the bug and a copy of an animation that triggers it and I'll fix it.

Happy animating!

- Dave

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Dave..... as we say in my part of the world..'fair play to ya'...for giving the SL community such a tool. To be honest, I'm only just starting to get into animation but I'll definitely download this and give it a try.... Thanks so much...

Hi Dave
Pay no attention to the negative posts. Im a pretty successfull animator in sl and i am happy u made this for those in sl that can not make their own. For me its of no use. For those animators that are pissed tho, just remember that many of the mocap animations and others, on the net, are already in sl, this products just really allows for the average jo to own them and put them into their builds.

Motion Capture is great but in the end its best only for dances and stuff like that. I totally agree with u dave. Even if u find a mocap for other sl animation products, the time, energy and changes made, all amount to it being quite a bit different from the original and hence makes it originally yours, in most cases. In the end the only way to become successfull in the animation business is by being creative and knowing how to make your own. Im not worried 1 bit about my animations business, lol. Keep up the good work Dave. Now maybe fewer people will ask me to sell full perm anims.

Dave,

I can send you one of the BVH files that has given me trouble. The problem doesn't seem to be completely reproducable; it's crashed one on me this morning, but then not with what I think is the same sequence. ?Speed at which I delete things maybe? Anyway, sorry to be so long getting back to you; I've been having fun fiddling with this once I did get it into Poser. Thanks.

Whichway Janus

I'd been adding new features to bvhacker since last December. I just added a fix for Whichway's problem, and so thought I'd do another release. Here's a list of updates:

1) The 'knit' function for looping has been improved.
2) The crashing problem when deleting many joints quickly has been worked around.
3) Pressing the new 'QC' button will produce a Quality Check report on your desktop that lists any common problems found with your animation.

The new version is available here: http://www.davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/

@Whichway - I've now deleted the animation file I used to test the new version. Thanks for your trust! Let me know if you still have problems...

@Medhue - Thanks for your comments - I appreciate your support! It's a long time since I used bvhacker to make an animation, but I always use it to do the 'final polishing' on each and every one of my anims before upload. For instance, I find it easier not to have to preview everything with a 'break spline on frame 1' in Poser. With bvhacker you can just add the T-stance with the touch of a button at the last minute. Also, when I comes to centering my anims, I don't like using the clunky 'Select all keyframes' - it's so much easier with the sliders in bvhacker. And not to forget, the new QC (Quality Check report) is very useful for spotting mesh tearing or animation size problems before upload...
These are just examples of the sort of functionality I've been adding to bvhacker over the last year or so - check it out - you might like it!

@all - enjoy!

ave

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---:: Animazoo animations - The best dances in SL - Smooth AOs - Freebies ::---
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Cool! Thanks!

Which

Dave -- a little OT perhaps, but maybe BVHacker can do seomthing to help.

How do you deal with the fact that SL "compresses" our animations, causing nice smooth anims to look jerky inworld? Note that I'm using 15 FPS for most of mine, but the FPS doesn't seem to affect things much -- actually, the lower the FPS, the fewer joint movements seem to be lost by the compression (I think ... but based on too few data points to be sure).

This compression is driving me nuts!

Hi Lear,

Yep, the compression is indeed a pain - sorry to say bvhacker cannot do anything about that!

How's the filtering project coming on?

Regards,

Dave

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Works great (except for SL's optimization). And now puts breathing into an animation, using a very simple method. See my thread on this forum (BVH filter program).

I like the breathing idea Lear, I'll consider that for future releases of my software if that's cool with you

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Sure, it's a simple idea easily implemented.

It would be cool to build the filtering in too, but before you spend any time on that I need to work out one big issue. SL optimizes BVH data on upload, and this causes small changes to be lost. Filtering causes lots of small changes, so the resulting animation is less robotic, but had jerks in it. I'm looking for a solution to that.

The breathing suffers a bit from that too, since I use a sine wave and modify every frame (making every frame essentially a key frame), but there should be ways to minimize that by hand-crafting a handful of keyframes and then just applying the motions as deltas.

BTW, I figure that a cycloid would look better than a sine wave, but after filtering the sine wave looks pretty good. I actually have 2 phases: 1/3 of the cycle uses no adjustment, and the other 2/3 goes through a sine wave with offset of 1 -- so the chest rests, rises, then falls, then rests again.

If you can make sense out of that, you're pretty good.

Oops: most recently posted version is half rest, half sinewave. I've changed that to the one-third rest then two-thirds sine wave, but haven't posted that code.

This looks like a useful tool! I didn't read all the posts in here, so I'm sorry if someone else has asked this - have you looked into adding avatar deformation functions to this program?
I was reading about it in this thread, I wonder if it could be automated. /52/80/224916/1.html


EDIT:

Hey Dave, I just wanted to post in here again to thank you for making this great little utility! You saved me from tearing the rest of my hair out.

The Scale + button was all it took to make the movement scale properly from poser to SL. I had an animation that was crouching and the feet were lifting off the ground, also the avatar wasn't moving forward as much as it was supposed to.

Nice work!

I was cruising the web the other day, and I found this cool academic paper on 'cartoonifying" and animation. Basically, they used fancy math to post-process an animation to add anticipation, exaggeration, and rebound.

http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/animfilter/

http://research.microsoft.com/~cohen/TheCartoonAnimationFilter.pdf

It is a filter that takes an animation and makes it more animated, like an old Looney Tunes cartoon...

Hi, I'm attempting to tryout the bvh tool. The file currently downloading from Dave's site is about 470k... Has anyone run into this or is it just me?

I tried with IE and FF and another computer (XP & Vista)... All with the same result. My ZipGenius shows only the setup.exe in the archive.

Hi Nalates,

I just checked the download - it seems fine. I'm not sure what zipgenius is - have you tried opening the downloaded file with winzip or winrar?

Regards,

Dave

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Thanks for the response!

What size is the file?

That will tell me if I have a zip or a DL problem.

The download page says it's 3Mb
http://davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/

While downloading, firefox says its 2.8Mb

After download finishes vista says its 2.4Mb....
and not a valid zip file when i try to open it.

There seems to be some corruption problem there Dave.
I had no hiccups with transmssion speed nor bandwidth, so I'm guessing the problem is server side.

Hi Nalates, BETLOG

Thanks for letting me know about this. After further tests, it looks like my hosting provider is once again failing to provide consistent service - this download has been working fine for months, I've changed nothing, and now it's broken. This is the latest in a long series of problems I've had with Streamline. I am in the process of changing provider.

In the meantime, I've put another copy of bvhacker here:

http://www.davedub.co.uk/downloads/bvhacker_win_XP.zip

During my tests, I found I could sometimes get a successful download, but had to remove the corrupt version from my browser cache first.

For the record, I wouldn't recommend using Streamline.net to anyone - aside from this new problem of corrupt downloads, it's impossible to test updates to your site since everything is cached for days and their databases have a 30 second timeout as opposed to the standard 90 seconds provided by most. And don't even get me started on their customer support! Upon researching the company for the purposes of reporting them to trading standards, I've found its owner to be a guy called 'Micheal Dollarmore' - a name that speaks volumes to me about the man's ethics. If I'd known that before I signed up I would have been more cautious!</rant>

I'll post here once I have got my site up with a new host.

ave

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This one downloads, installs, and runs fine.

However this reminds me of a completely unrelated issue.
I have been using blender to export BVH for SL recently, and for some reason BVHacker doesnt read them correctly, whereas they are fine when imported direct to SL.
I cant imagine what would make BVHacker read them as incorrectly as it does, but it totally doesnt like something about that particular output.

This is the basic .blend file setup
http://jacek.meratalk.com/2008/05/28/animation-exporter-update/

and heres a zip with the basic .blend with a simple pose change (both arms raise 45 degrees up, and the left leg lifts up and out from the body bending at the knee)...and the exported bvh file.
http://rapidshare.com/files/124949070/TEST-basic_exporter_2008-05-28.zip.html

Even with the new URL IE7 and Vista had a problem. No go.

I have an XP with FF. I used that and no problem. File opens now and extrated files seem to work.

Vista is setup to use IPv6 and auto-tune the connection as it goes. Your ISP may be having problems with that or it is even more likely that a router between us a problem.

THanks for your help, yours too BETLOG.

@Nalates:

I've now changed my hosting provider to a US based one, so it may be worth you trying both urls again:

http://davedub.co.uk/bvhacker/downloads/bvhacker_win_XP.zip

http://www.davedub.co.uk/downloads/bvhacker_win_XP.zip

I'd apprecite it if you could let me know how you get on...


@BETLOG:

I'm having trouble downloading the file from Rapidshare - I get either

"The download session has expired." or
I'm told that I'm already downloading a file (which I'm not!)

Without seeing the file, I'm guessing that the values inside the bvh are separated by tabs and not spaces. It's easily fixed by opening the file in a text editer and replacing all tabs with 2 or three spaces (usually ctrl-H for find and replace...). I've been meaning to fix this in bvhacker for ages now, but still have not got around to it!

If this doesn't work, please just email the bvh file to me at dave at davedub dot co dot uk, and I'll see what I can do.

Regards,

Dave

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They download just great on Vista and IE7.

Your new ISP must be better! Hooray. Thanks for tool.

Thanks for the response Nalates, glad to hear my new hosting provider is doing their job!

ave

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