Exporting BVH animation to Character Studio

If you want to use BIPED in Character Studio, you may have to export your animation as a Biovision (BVH) file. Before exporting your animation, you must create a biped-type skeleton with the proper naming conventions in MotionBuilder. You must also plot the animation onto the skeleton itself, respecting its hierarchy.

Character Studio imposes names for the skeleton’s bones (nodes). If your skeleton does not use the names in the following table (alternate names are shown in parentheses), then Character Studio rejects the skeleton when you import the .bvh file.

The .bvh file hierarchy requirement is important because the order in which every joint of a skeleton is the child of a parent joint, with the exception of the root joint. If you open a .bvh file in a text editor, you can see that the hip joint is at the root of the hierarchy. When you export an animated skeleton using .bvh, MotionBuilder does not use the skeleton hip joint as root by default, but uses its reference node instead. Because of this, Biped does not recognize this first node, which leads to a static pelvis joint on a Biped character.

You must export your scene in .bvh format in order to bring it back into Character Studio.

To export your .bvh animation to Character Studio

1. In the Viewer window, select the skeleton's Hip joint.
   NoteIf you do not select the Hip joint, the Export Options dialog box does not display the correct menu items to perform this operation.
2. Select File > Motion File Export, and enter a name for the new file.
3. In the Export Options dialog box, select Selected Model and Children from the Content menu. (For more information, see Exporting motion files) When you select Selected Model and Children from the Content, MotionBuilder uses your skeleton's hip joint as a root in the resulting .bvh file.
4. Make sure that the File name and Sampling Rate are correct, and click Export.
5. In 3ds Max, load the new .bvh file onto a Biped.