Importing BVH from other programs?

There are a few free repositories of BVH files out there, but so far it's been rather frustrating. Roothing through the files, it seems the various joints are named differently, and the rotation channels are in different orders.

Okay, so I can rename the joints, and in theory so long as the channel data matches the definition order, that shouldn't matter.

The leg animations work, but the arm animations are seriously whacked.

Anyone have any success imorting non-Poser bvh files?

Hrm... drop in a link or a bvh, maybe we can figure out whats going wrong with them.

Here (assuming I've worked the "Attachments" buttons correctly) should be kick01.txt which is the version I downloaded (and works just fine in my standalone BVH viewer), and kick01a.txt which is the one where I renamed the joints.

Obviously the .txt files should be .bhv's.

Any ideas?

First of all, you're haveing just the same trouble with this. It doesn't matter wheather it is the bvh file of Poser or non-Poser.

I tweaked the socond one and made sure that it worked.

It certainly does - now all I need to do is work out how to fix the others

So - how did you get it fixed?

Add one frame on your animation and shift all keyframes to the one frame right. On the first frame, reset the value of position and rotation of all part.

I've explained how to shift keyframes here.

I should have been more specific I mean to ask what programs you were using. Poser, right?

I was kinda hoping I could just do it in a text editor

It must be exactly in Stone's. Wait for his response.
But in the end, you'll have to analyze and understand it by yourself. Compare the both and understand the defference. And you have to let it work for other animations, too. Writing directly bvh is more than I can do. Sorry, I can't help you anymore. Good luck.

Thanks for your help so far

Sorry for the delayed responce, been tending to some RL things lately. Taking a look at these files, I'm sure I can craft up an easy way for you to just fix these in a text editor.
EDIT:
Well after hacking and slashing there isn't a actual good way to text edit these up to speed, those free files dont have the same amount of info as for example a poser 6 .bvh has, and things are in a little different order. Only real solution is to run them through poser, add the blank frame 0 and then re-export to .bvh for upload.

Welcome back, Stone. And is this your first post as a registered user?

Speaking of bvh hack, Korvar, refer to this thread, too.

Bah! what the heck happened there? I've posted more than just once or twice. =P

Stone, Welcome to SL!!!

*Takes a bow* Great to be back Seagel, great to be back. =P

Hi folks, I'm looking into editing (and generation) of bvh files for SL.

I've a lot of experience writing small programs to massarge this kind of file
all I need to do is understand (properly) what the fixes are.

I've also got some long term plans for generation of bvh data, but
we're probably talking several months before I get even a beta version.

Any help I can give with coding, I'm happy to help.

I wrote a BVH exporter for Maya 5 in MEL several months ago. It's at http://circle.twu.net/progs/

You might also take a look at the Blender source code which has BVH import/export capabilities and is free and open source.