Can 3DS MAx make .bvh anims?

Avimator sucks. So does Qavimator. The notable lack of an undo button is especially frustrating.

So I tried daz, and.. it's average, in my opinion. I asked the Daz community forums about a few issues I was having with it, and their general response..


"The veterans will tell you, don't bother using D|S for animation"

"The animation interface has long been a subject of derision. I don't know anyone who hasn't had problems using it. "

"Daz|Studio sucks at animation. It can do it, but it's a frustrating experience. "


It's the best I've found so far, but still not so great. I know of poser, but it's pretty expensive, and I'd rather not buy something like that unless necessary. Especially when I already have a big shiny 3D program. 3DS Max 8. I've played with that a little, and it seems to do better than daz in almost every area of animation, except that I can't export BVH files.

Does anyone know of a plugin to allow BVH exporting for 3DS Max? Is it even possible?

There's no direct way to get a bvh out of max. I've been researching this myself the last few days thinking there had to be a maxscript out there somewhere, but no luck. I've found two possible options. There's PuppetShop (http://www.lumonix.net/puppetshop.html) which is primarily a rigging tool but also does bvh import and export. There's also Okino's Polytrans (http://www.okino.com/conv/conv.htm). In theory, either option should be suitable, provided you build a rig that matches the SL avatar bone structure and naming conventions.

I tried out the demo of Polytrans and it seems like it would work. It's hard to tell since the demo version won't export a complete bvh (only a quarter of the frames) so SL gives an "unexpected end of file" error when attempting to upload. But, from looking at the bvh in notepad it seemed to be formatted correctly. The cool thing about it is that if you import an SL compliant BVH file, it automatically creates the bones with the correct names and hierarchy. You just need to do the rigging (adding IK solvers, wired parameters, and what have you). I haven't decided if I want to spend the money on the full version yet, but it's tempting. Words can't fully describe how much I hate Poser.