3DS Max BVH Exporter beta8

Thanks for the quick response Abu. I'll try to check out this version tomorrow.

Edit: looks good!

Man, I missed your edit. Sounds like it's working good for you, then.

I got to thinking about it after a bit and I remembered that one of my pose things was off by 90 degrees. These were poses that I had exported with 1a and didn't double-check in QAvimator like I usually do. I chaulked up the rotation offset to some unknown gremlin. Turns out that *I* was the gremlin.

Just got back from the main grid and it's working for me, too. Well, the static poses that I tested are goodly aligned.

Cheers.

Yeah sorry, I slipped it in without thinking about it not bumping the thread. Thanks again for the script and the quick updates.

Do you have a wee bit more instruction material for the .msr?

I'm using Max8
Opened the Abus_Anim_Template_pyg_rig_v01
Made some motions for frame 2
Ran the script.

Nothing happens noticably.

Sorry, I did get the script to work. Can it be recoded to export up to 300 frames, please?

What was the problem and the fix? This could help someone in the future.



I can give you a pointer until Abu shines his light on this. It's an easy fix (well, easy enough for me to figure out and I'm a MaxScript novice). If you open up the MaxScript file look for these lines:

spinner spnStartframe "Start Frame" pos:[59,36] width:86 height:16 range:[0,100,0] type:#integer scale:1
spinner spnEndframe "End Frame" pos:[61,64] width:84 height:16 range:[0,100,100] type:#integer scale:1

and change the instances of 100 to 298

spinner spnStartframe "Start Frame" pos:[59,36] width:86 height:16 range:[0,298,0] type:#integer scale:1
spinner spnEndframe "End Frame" pos:[61,64] width:84 height:16 range:[0,298,298] type:#integer scale:1

That should sort it. Don't save over the original just in case!

I haven't made any long animations myself, so I haven't tested this by uploading to SL. Use at your own risk, not responsible for any damages or health issues this may cause, offer not valid in Alaska or the US territories.

Why 298 and not 300 you may ask? This was my thinking - frame numbering starts at zero in Max (0-298=299 frames ) and you need to leave one frame for the reference frame that automatically gets added by the script.

Pygora pretty much nailed it.

However, if I remember correctly, the frames exported and the FPS are entirely independent of each other. I think you can export 20 frames @ 300 FPS... I think.

If you tell it frames 2 to 20 + T-pose, the script is smart enough to get the frame count in the BVH file correct (if you consider a well placed +1 as smart, heh).

I did wrestle for a bit about putting in a spinner for FPS. Why put a spinner in for custom FPS when MaxScript can grab it and toss it in for you? Because animating for Second Life is a slightly different beast than your average animation job. Several things come into play and FPS is one of those things. This is why I capped it at 30 FPS.

Don't be afraid of messing with the script. Read up on some MS and dink around. Just make sure you keep an original just in case like Pygora said.

Py, I want to try to catch you in-world to show you one of the reasons why I did this little project. Not finished as I got caught up in other things, but what I do have done and in-world might be considered really cool.

For getting the script to work, I'll post Abu's instructions that I missed



I had forgotten to do the Customize part. I assigned a shortcut to this plugin and things work nice. I added the parenteticals to help out new users.

Yes, I rewrote the part of the maxscript to allow for 600 frames. I need more frames. I think it's SL being a nudge on filesizes that aren't helping us.

Pygora Acronym.. for the Biped skeleton, I deleted the hand and feet controllers off the original skeleton avatar. Biped can handle it's own FK/IK. The addition IK controllers caused conflicts, especially if you do re-imports of *.bip works for MotionMixer.

Hey, someone is using the biped amalgamation! Cool!

If you dont' need it by all means delete it, but you seem to misunderstand what it is for so I wanted to clarify for posterity. Part of bipeds IK/FK system is the ability to use targets for the IK in the hand or foot for the limb to seek. Those "controls" are targets to seek for if you want to animate the IK Blend value under the Biped Key Info panel. If you just want to IK animate you would just key the actual hands or feet. But if you want to do something similar to a IK/FK blend motion you would use the controls as your seeker goal.

If you are just using it to translate other motion files over to SL BVH it isn't going to do anything for you, but if you use it as a straight animation rig, or to tweak mocap, it can be handy (pardon the pun) to use.

That's a good explaination for FK/IK for others. I'm more familiar with Biped on it's own, where I can set keys and change the IK strength values as needed. (especially hand keying a walking foot action.) I deleted the skeleton's IK controls because they were conflicting with the Biped's ability (as in Bip hand key at IK 100% and the control rig's hand at 100% in different spot... ewww..broken wrist!) ... and since I'm converting my own animations from one use to SL use, I encountered the conflict.

Yep, translating motion files is a case where they won't help with your work flow. Ironically that's a big reason I included the Biped version in the first place, rather than just making the bones based rig. Ah well.

I'll leave the controls as is for now, as a simple pressing of the delete key takes care of the issue for the user

I want to thank you guys for making this available. I have yet to actually get it to work for the kinds of animations that I make, but I appreciate the effort that was put into it and the kindness shown in releasing it to the public


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PS: Can I just take this opportunity to say how much donkey butt these forums suck? The search function doesn't allow the user to search for legitimate three-letter words like "3ds", "max", or "bvh", and since the forums are not visible to Google it would have taken me a very long time to find this thread again if I hadn't subscribed to it and managed to find a very old as-yet-unpurged forum notification in my email's Trash folder......

Future-Reference Search Key : "3dsMax Animation Exporter"

I know what you mean. I got tired of rooting around for this thread once it rolled off the front pages so I posted a link to this thread up in the "Animation Editors" Sticky for quick access.

Ah, I missed that... Good idea

Thanks for the work on the exporter and rig guys! They are both awesome! I have been looking for a 3dsmax avatar anim solution on and off for about a year and always came up empty handed. I even tried to make one myself (fail).

Poser is a nightmare and other apps like Qavimator and BVhacker just don't have the features I need. The exporter, rig and max solves all that!

Poser is a PITA (pain in the...) for sure. Luckily for me, I got it when it was on sale for $20, although I missed the "For Free" announcement here on the forums, *pout*.

The program I've been using for SL animations most is DAZ|Studio, and it's also a pain in the rear, just less so than Poser. Can't beat the price tag, though.

Using Max is a HUGE step up, no question about it. It's animation capabilities are so far and above those others, yet in my own humble opinion it's actually easier to use for the most part.

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I still can't get the Biped rig posted above to export properly. I don't know why, but the Abus_Anim_Template08_pyg_rig_v01 file seems to export okay, just not the biped.

I'm going to try rebuilding the biped rig, and hopefully Pygora can chime in with any gotchas or things to watch out for.

It's been awhile since I did the biped rig but IIRC I just use the align tool in Figure Mode to line up the joints with Abu's armature. There was a fair amount of eyeballing too as I recall. If you have any specific questions I'll be happy to try and answer them.

It's weird that the biped rig gives you issues while the Pyg Rig does not. Both are just there as tools to move Abu's armature which is what actually generates the SL BVH data. I'll have to take a look later and see if I get any issues with the Biped setup. I have not used it in a very long time.

That's the approach I was going to try too.


Maybe I have a mismatch of the export script version and the biped rig version? I don't know. The base stuff from Abu looks the same on cursory inspection, but I won't have a chance to really dig in until after work tonight.

I'm super motivated to get *something* working, as it's time for me to do another entire set of animations, and I don't want to use DAZ this time

If I run into any issues or have any specific questions I'll be sure to post them.

Thanks!

It looks like the problems I had with Abu's base template were cause by a process issue that was my fault, where I imported the resulting .bvh file onto a DAZ skeleton in order to sanity-check the animation before uploading to SL, but the skeleton I was using is borked. Trying it out on another known-good (for Second Life) rig seems to work fine initially, though I haven't yet tried the full range of motions I normally need for my animations, and uploading to Second Life works mostly as expected.

The biped rig, however, still doesn't seem to export right. Most of the limbs seem to have the rotations off, at times by up to 90 degrees. I'm going to ignore that for now since I want to try to redo the biped anyways, I just thought I'd throw that out there.

I was able to reproduce that problem completely independently, by the way. While it's true that the biped is there to move Abu's armature, it also seems to change it's coordinate frame of reference. Or rather, the setup in it's entirety does, though it doesn't seem directly related to the biped itself.

Everything was working quite well up until I added a biped control spline and root control spline as you've done, and at that point I started getting odd orientations on export. Simply breaking the parent/child links of those objects allowed export to work fine again. Similarly, the foot control splines being related to the root control spline seemed to cause adverse effects. I didn't bother to test the hand controls.

I didn't research the issue any further than that yet, but my initial gut reaction was to wonder if that hierarchical relationship changed the coordinate frame of reference in a subtle but important way that the export script does not handle properly.

I did a test animation in Max 8 using Second Life-BVHExporter1b, mbColllapse (http://www.breidt.net/scripts/index.html#mbCollapse), on a fresh download of the biped setup I posted here. I animated manipulating the splines and switched IK blend to zero and animated with the biped directly to see if I could get any errors. I notice that I had sloppily set the left arm to Euler rotations, while everything else is quaternion, but that shouldn't affect anything. I don't get any issues with the output on my end in DAZ Studio or upon uploading it to the test grid.

Note that the splines don't change the hierarchy; you can check this in the schematic view. They just act as targets for the biped IK goal in the case of the hands and feet and the Biped root is linked to the hip spline. You actually can't change the biped internal hierarchy, even if you wanted to. You can link things to the biped of course, but the base structure is invariable.

Of course that doesn't help your issues. Is there any way you can post the problem file somewhere so I can take a look at it? Does the forum attachment system work again yet?

How do I use the mbCollapse tool on the biped? I am having problems with the head and neck not working properly in-world. Everything else is working fine I think (need more testing to confirm that though). I tried mbCollapse on the neck and head but get an error. What's the correct way to do it?

Well, I appreciate the offer to look into it, but it would seem I'm the only person experiencing issues with the biped rig. Since I now have a biped rig that works to my satisfaction, I'm content to write off the problems I was having before as just some oddness that only I was having.

Thanks again for the work on this, Abu and Pygora, it's simply freaking ecstatic about being able to use Max for Second Life animations!!!


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You should use it on Abu's armature, not on the biped itself. If you are using my biped file you can just hide all the layers except the one with Abu's armature, select all it's parts, then run mbCollapse. A key should appear on each and every frame for all the armature components. Then you can run Abu's script and it will base the BVH output on the keys you baked.

Let me know if that works for you.

Cool, thanks. I didn't realise that there was extra stuff hidden in the file. I tried it and mbcollapse didn't throw errors which is good. Haven't had time to get the anim into my test region yet, but it's solid progress