Again on Maya: retarget FBX-BVH mocap to a different rig - AKA Motor in Maya?

[Nicolas Esposito]

Hi guys,

I have roughly 100 animations downloaded from Mixamo website ( I'm currently working as animator on a game related project ).

All the animations are in FBX and some of them are BVH, so basically I need to apply those animations to my rig.

The rig itself is built using the Epic plugin for Maya called ART, which is a kind of Species plugin extended to work with non human character as well.

So...since the bone names are different between the FBX and my rig is there a way to apply the FBX animation to my custom rig ala Motor as in Softimage?

As you all know in Softimage it takes roughly 1 minutes to setup everything and match the bones between different rigs...what about Maya?

Please give me good news :)

PS: Going thru Softimage to do this is not an option due to rig restrictions and it'll mess up lots of stuff, I already tried.

Cheers

Nicolas

[Cesar Saez]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1hV8BqsCEA

[Cesar Saez]

The previous video doesn't show how to retarget animation to a custom rig, my bad, sorry.

This is the one: http://youtu.be/eBwYi8FeK3I?t=3m22s

[Nicolas Esposito]

Sweet, thank you :)

[Nicolas Esposito]

I've tried Motion Builder and HumanIK directly inside Maya, but the main issue that I have is that both MB and HIK have the same "constraint" that is Y axis must be Up, while in my case Z is up.

I found an alternative solution that is do a script...not really...I simply copy/paste whats in the script editor, and apply the retargeting to my character...

Basically what I'm doing is:

- Import the FBX animation file

- Go to frame -1

- Select all the bones and zero-out all the rotation data, kinda doing a Go to bind pose

- Apply ( for each bone ) an Orient constraint from the BVH file to my skeleton ( which is in Bind pose ), in this way I have a match between the bind pose from the bvh and my skeleton, and a Point constraint for the hips

- So at this point I have the animation ( well, the bones orientation ) of my skeleton driven by the BVH file

I do the "go to bind pose for the BVH" and the "apply orient constraint" using a custom script, but the main problem that I have right now is that my skeleton is just driven without any animation keys...

So how can I bake keys into my skeleton for each frame, since there are no keys at all, but its just orient driven by the BVH?

It'll be nice to have a clip inside the Trax editor, or be able to modify/adjust everything with curves...

Hope its clear