How do I export a BVH from Daz3d?

I imported the SL model, made a simple animation... but I cant figure out how to export as a .bvh. Do I need to export as something else and convert it?

I'd bump this, but it's still the most recent post in the forums. Where did everyone go?


I'm feeling all alone here. *sad look*

Right now I don't think Daz Studio supports BVH. Last I saw, word in the forums was a plugin might be made, but I wouldn't hold your breath for it.

That said, Blender 3D does have support for BVH now. NO idea how well it works. I fired up blender and just about died from the interface.

Thanks, I'll check that out; I'm not buying poser when I don't know if I can do what I want with it and the poser demo is useless.

Hmmm... Maybe I could build an animation in DAZ, export it to Blender, and then to BVH. DAZ looked pretty similar to poser to me, as far as the relevent bits went.

dude, you are not listening. Daz Studio doesn't support BVH. It only animates keyframes and renders those keyframes to "yes" make animations but they are animated images that produce a film. You need poser's walk creator to create your own animation or download BVH files from a site - I recommend renderosity.com

You do not need poser's walk animator to make an animation. Just um. A walk one. And please do not be so flippant about downloading BVH files. Many of us believe it is wrong to dl them and then sell them in SL. While some may say it is on the line of copywright laws it's still wrong to put up other's work as your own.

Most of the time what you want to animate will not be found on those sites. As a lot of animations have to fit with inworld items. Not to mention you would still need poser to edit the keyframes because I highly doubt that the first frame is set to the default pose. Not to mention a number of possible issues that will come up from using an animation from a non poser 2 avatar. Personally the idea seems silly to me. No work = crappy anim that anyone could dl. Loads of tweaking and you still haven't actually created anything. Then again most of the ones you can dl for free are already inworld sitting in freebie boxes.

Nepenthes Ixchel:

Yes.. Blender now supports BVH but I have heard there are joint issues that will just give you a headache anyways. SL avatars are from Poser 2. You don't need to go out and buy the expensive Poser 6. Just find an older version of it. Poser 5 has been working fine for me. I've heard you can find a copy for $40 -50 US. Recouping that really will not take too long.

If Poser can't do what you want it to do, then most likely SL wouldn't be able to. Not to mention that I doubt that any free animator is going to be able to something that an expensive one can't. While Poser wouldn't be my top choice, it sure is easy to use.

true, but I'm not talking about downloading and selling someone elses work. I'm simply helping someone out who wants to animate his avatar. I don't care what he does with it afterwards.

No need to be rude, Mantur. What Napenthus is suggesting is perfectly logical, although unfortunately not feasable, at least not very easily. Nap, let me explain why for you.

Daz Studio is really limited. It works great as a self-contained free alternative to Poser, but self-contained is as far as it goes. It's not able to export anything except OBJ's, and as you may or may not know, OBJ's contain no animation data whatsoever.

So, you could export a character model from Daz Studio to Blender, sure, but only in a very limited way, and certainly not in a way that would help you directly for SL. All that would be available to Blender would be the poly mesh. Among the things that would be missing from the export would be the skeleton, which is the one peice of the model that is absolutely vital for creating, retaining, and exporting animation data. Without the skeleton, nothing else matters, animation-wise.

Now you may be asking, if the skeleton is required for animation data, how come you can export an OBJ with more than one frame and have it appear to animate in another program. The answer is it's not real animation. OBJ files just contain instructions for how to build polygons, not what to do with them. The easiest way to understand what happens with multi-framed OBJ's is to think of it as the model is being destroyed after every frame, and a new one is being built in the next frame. It's not one persistant model that actually has moving parts and morphs and deformers and all that good stuff that makes a "real" character model animate.

Anyway, if you want to animate from Blender, you certainly can, but Daz Studio will not help you in this regard except to provide a visual frame of reference for what a given animation sequence looks like. You'll still have to build a skeleton from scratch in Blender, and you're still going to have to animate it by hand in Blender, which means using Daz first would amount to nothing more than a giant waste of time, as it would mean doing everything twice.

To use Blender or any other program (besides Poser} for SL animation would require you to have a pretty good understanding of the ins and outs of 3D character rigging and animation. At a minumum, you'd need to know how to build a skeleton that exactly matches the skeleton from the Poser models, as well as how to use the program to spit out BHV files that exactly match the ones Poser would create. It's not exactly hard if you know what you're doing, but it's fairly advanced if you're new to all this.

As for Daz Studio itself, I have every confidence that as it continues to evolve it will become more and more useful. Daz is an impressive company, and I'm sure they have big plans for Studio down the road. However, considering that in the here and now, Poser is responsible for most of Daz's main business (model sales), and considering that Daz Studio is a freebie that was created as more of a safety net than anything else, in case something happens to Poser, it makes sense that Daz Studio's growth is slow going.

The people who spend the money to buy Poser obviously have money to spend, which means they're good customers for Daz models. Many of the people who use Daz Studio do so either because they're reluctant to spend money or because they just don't have any. Either way, they're not great customers for Daz, so it continues to be in Daz's best interest to make sure that Daz Studio is functional, but not quite as feature rich as Poser. I don't think that will change until and unless they ever want to start charging for Studio, which I'm pretty sure they don't plan to do.

I don't blame you, by they way, for not wanting to buy Poser. Personally, I hate the program. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a necessary evil for SL since it's the one program in the world that comes ready out of the box to do what SL'ers need. Also, it's very cheap for 3D software. Poser Artist is only like a hundred bucks, and it will do everything you need.

I wasn't rude in any way. I'm not promoting plagiarism, and I'm defending myself from that accusation.

What I thought was rude was where you appeared to be scolding Nep for "not listening". I thought it was fairly obvious he was seeking to learn, which meant by definition that he was eager to listen. He stuck his neck out to ask if an idea he had might work, and then you proceded to try to chop it off by essentially telling him to shut up.

At least, that's how it appeared, anyway. If the appearance was misleading, and you've actually got a nice, firendly definition of "Dude, you're not listening" that I might have missed, by all means please share it.



The downloading animations from websites thing is another matter altogether. I agree with Luth that it's wrong to sell such animations without the original creators' permission, but I also agree with you that there was nothing in your post that suggested anyone do so. "Flippant" probably wasn't the best choice of words Luth could have employed since it has two definitions, but I don't think Luth was trying to accuse you of anything. I believe he was using the more benign definition, which simply means "loosely talkative", as opposed the more aggressive one, meaning disrespectful. I think Luth was simply trying to say that it's probably best not to suggest downloading without also clarifying the importance of not using the downloaded material improperly, and without warning that much of the available material is not totally compatable with SL.

perhaps the term "not listening" could have been replaced with "listen up". Despite english being my 3rd language I disagree completely with you saying that I am being rude. In any case Sean had said beforehand that BVH was not supported in DAZ studio, so when Nep continued to talk about exporting BVH's with DAZ, it was obvious that he had not read the post properly. I further then went to explain that DAZ animations are movie animations done with keyframes - each keyframe is rendered as an image and then compiled into a film. wrong kind of animation. If someone is going to ask for help, the least they can do is read the post.

As for what Luth said, how else is one supposed to interpret what he said, given the context? In any case we're going off beat here. What I would like to see in the future is animations for objects, eg wings.

I really don't want to dwell on this, but in the interest of fairness, I think the one who wasn't listening, or wasn't reading the post, or whatever you want to call it, was you. Nep did not say he wanted to send BVH from Daz Studio to Blender. He was inquiring if there were a way to export animation from Studio in some other form than BVH that Blender would then be able to convert to BVH. If you take a look, Nep's exact words were "Maybe I could build an animation in DAZ, export it to Blender, and then to BVH." That's DAZ -> Blender -> BVH, not DAZ -> BVH -> Blender.

You and I know that the answer to that question is no, of course, but the question itself was perfectly reasonable coming from someone who didn't know. I see no reason why a newbie should be aware that Blender cannot open .DAZ files, for example. If someone doesn't know much about 3D software, it's perfectly reasonable to assume it might.

Photoshop can open PSP files; Word can open WordPerfect files; DAZ Studio can open Poser files; why shouldn't someone at least wonder if Blender can open DAZ files? Seems like a perfectly logical question to me.

well if he had bothered to read the features list on the site like you and I have, he would have seen the file formats supported.

*Claps for Chosen*



She figured that would be the nicest response due to her loathing of people who dl and sell.

No I wasn't accusing you of anything which is why I did not come out and say that. Trust me, if I was accusing you, I would have been REALLY mean.

My use of the word "Flippant" was actually well thought out because of the double meaning. It was meant to be taken that if you are infact sugesting the sale of other's work then take it as disrespectful. If you are not, then take it as "loosely talkative," because "it's probably best not to suggest downloading without also clarifying the importance of not using the downloaded material improperly, and without warning that much of the available material is not totally compatable with SL." In other words, both meanings can apply.

Geez, Mantur, you just won't quit, will you? Now you're saying there's something wrong with someone because he hasn't read the features list of a program he's never even used, a program he may not have even heard of before someone else suggested it to him today. Wow. That's harsh. I guess "no need to be rude" didn't quite register with you, did it?

Nep, if you're still reading this, sorry your thread has been hijacked by this silliness. I hope the factual information that I posted for you turns out to be helpful. This will be my last post in this thread since I have no desire to contine feeding the troll here. If you have any further questions on animation, I'd advise starting a new thread. Once a thread turns ugly like this one has, it's pretty tuff to steer it back in the right direction.

I don't find my attitude rude. If you do then that's not my problem. I can't see why we should help people who won't help themselves.

end of discussion for me.

Can Blender read standard Poser files? Just this week, DAZ released a free DAZ Studio-to-Poser exporter. If Blender can read Poser files, Nep can export from DAZ to this Poser format, which can then be read by Blender and coverted into BVH.

excellent, can you post the link?

Thanks everyone! I'm going to pretend there was no flame war, just lots of posts telling me how wonderful my idea was before very gently explaining why it wouldn't actually work. *Smiles*



I think Blender can read poser files... it seemed to open the SL avatar thingy that is used to make animations and provide control dials for the joints. I say "I think" because the Blender interface was designed by brain damaged monkeys and I had trouble using the open file interface, so I'm not very confident of my observations.

I'll try this new export tool when I get a chance, if I can figure out a workflow that is not too hard and actually works I'll post details.



Preliminary BVH creation with free software

Start->Run->notepad. Advanced users may wish to use a different text editor, such as ed, and Mac users are on their own at this stage.

Following these guidlines type out the skeletal header information, followed by the animation data

Daz needs bug reports on the BVH export feature...

https://www.daz3d.com/bugs/

Especially if you are technically aware.