Maya BVH export and animating in Maya help please!

[Kazuhiro Aridian]

Hey there, I just finished up a sea creature avatar build, got a test rig put together in Maya, and tried a few BVH exporter scripts and keep running across the same error: "unable to read animation file. Incorrect root joint name, use 'hip'"

As far as I can tell from my investigation, animation and rigging use differently named joints in their rigs. On a whim I tried renaming all my joint names in the BVH file to the animation set of joints, with no success. I tried doing so within Maya as well. 

I got this to work two other times with humanoid avatars in the past. Anyone know how to get this to work with a deformed rig? Here's the avatar I'm working on (WIP textures/colors):



Any help would be greatly appreciated!
~Kaz

[Cathy Foil]

I haven't played much with making animations using Maya.
I done a bit of research on the topic since it is high on my todo list of things I want to add to my MayaStar plug-in.
I do know that in Maya the BVH exporter doesn't like the mPelvis bone to rotate at least not 180 degrees.  I am not sure if that is the problem you are having.

Here's a link to where you can download an animation rig and mel script that I know works for making animations with Maya for SL: LINK

Now the skeleton has all the correct names for BVH and the Y Axis is up instead of Z which I believe is what BVH files have to be.

SL can now upload .anim files but the .anim files Maya generates is not compatible with SL so you may be suck with BVH files.

I hope that helps.
Cathy

PS Your mesh is beautiful. Great work.

[Kazuhiro Aridian]

Thank you SO much! I've downloaded the rig you've kindly linked and I'll see if I can convince it to work for me. Woohoo!

I've already tried the BVH exporter that is in that list, but SL tells me the root joint should be "hip." The rig I use (and have used for the past 5 years, but have never used for Maya animation before) has mPelvis as the root, so maybe it's just an issue of the rig itself being wrong for this particular application.

I did try the .anim format as well earlier today and was unable to even get it to upload. It continually threw me a generic "server is having issues try again later" message, which didn't tell me enough to troubleshoot other than restarting my sim (it didn't help). 

Glad you like my mesh I'll be sure to comment in the thread about whether it all worked out or not.

[Kazuhiro Aridian]

Awesome, it worked!

Thank you SO much, animating this creature is going to be a ton of fun now!

[Raphael Maesar]

Please explain what files are needed(if not all) to install from that link and where they need to go in the maya program. thanks