Paul Forwood

Ben, thanks so much for that insight! Like I said, I have never used the "bake all actions" command so I am ignorant about what the end result would be. I will definitely be testing it later today though. Thanks again. ---------------- This is very useful but it still leaves the animator with motion that is pretty much left locked in stone. As all the constraints are removed it prevents refining and tweaking of the motion by manipulating the facial rig. I would like to be able to capture a face actor's performance, filter the BVH data through a plugin that would use user defined limits for each bone and remove any keys where the motion falls below those limits. The plugin would then copy the remaining keyframes into the action applied directly to the facial rig. The BVH file could then be discarded and the animator could refine the animation by removing and tweaking key frames in each of the channels as one normally does in an action. That would smooth the workflow and keep everything tidy and A:M native.

Anyone thinking of writing that BVH to Action converter yet?

I'm confused by the multiple copies of "BioVision BVH File1" that appear in the PWS. That's interesting, Luuk. Are you saying that we should use "Bake All Actions"? Sounds good in theory. And then I could get rid of all those BioVision BVN File1 duplicates. Hmmm. I've never baked an action. Hope this doesn't burn. ------------------ Edit: Wait a minute! If I bake the action doesn't that remove all the constraints and basically turn everything into muscle motion? Huge file sizes and no flexibility to tweak everything? Hmmm. I'll put up with the multiple BVH objects rather than lose the ability to tweak with bones.

Oh. I see that the voting is over. Never mind. There is always next time. That Winning Entry is a brilliant interpretation too.

Fantastic animating, David!!! I think that if the camera cut closer to the fish before he speaks and then cut back to a long shot for the jump it would it would emphisize where the voice is coming from. Just a thought. Maybe if your amazing character and his fish were centered, so that the fish didn't fly out of frame it would feel more balanced. At the moment all the action is happening on the right of the screen, and even off screen. Nice work and good luck in the contest.

This looks really very good. Like Robert said, more signs of weight. Have the character lean back more and keep the bottom corner of the books tucked right into his stomache/hips so that the weight pivots on that point. The straining arms and the body posture should reflect a constant battle to keep all that weight balanced around this point. The sound is good too.

The flame looks cool. I mean HOT. How did you do it?

Another fine looking model from you, Eric! With your frogman and now your guerilla it looks like you are building up to a battle of the beasties. Nice work!

Looks good. The second movie is bigger because it has a moving camera and, of course, it has sound.

Ha! Glad you solved it. Not being able to select a bone in a constraint operation is, I think, a fairly recent enhancement, (well within the last year or so). It prevents people like you and me from creating constraints that would lead to circulatory errors. Confusing at first but a very nice security blanket.

Beautiful, Satyajit! The texture on the chimney seems to need some attention. It looks like there is a bevel that has dropped it's decal maybe. Are you using hair for the leaves on the trees? They look so good that I am going to guess that they are cookie-cut patches. Very nice colour matching with your background too! Bravo!

Kelley, using BVH files really is pretty simple. To start with you should create a new action and import the BVH rig so that you can study it's simple hierarchy and layout. Then build a similar rig in your model. Once you have saved this model work through the following steps: 1) Create a new Action for your character. (As the BVH rig starts in a neutral pose it is probably best to start this way yourself so model the face with the mouth closed but relaxed). 2) Right click in the action window and select New\Motion Capture Device\Biovision BVH File. This creates an empty BVH object and you should see that you now have an Action Object called "BioVision BVH File1 Action Object". 3) Right click on this action object and select Capture Sequence. You will need to navigate to the BVH file that you wish to import. When you click "Open" the BVH data will be imported and you should see the frames being populated along the timeline. (Tip: Make sure that you close the PWS Timeline and just use the other timeline to speed this process up. Not really a problem but if you are importing several minutes of data you will appreciate the faster response). 4) The Zign Track BVH rig is just from the neck up. You will find that it has been deposited at your character's feet and that it is probably not the same scale as your character's rig. No problem. You can move and scale the BVH rig if you like but but it is not essential as your character's facial bones only need to imitate the rotations of the BVH bones and not the translations. 5) Constraints - Be sure that you are on frame 0 and work through your rig, starting at the neck, and assign "orient like" constraints to each of the matching bones in the BVH rig. Remember to use the "compensate" button. 6) Scrub through the timeline to check that everything is working. If you discover any frames where a bone makes a sudden, unexpected jump there is probably a tracking error in the data and you will need to go back into Zign Track, correct the position of the marker and generate the BVH data again. Generating and exporting the BVH data is instantaneous so this isn't really a problem. Also, while scrubbing consider the weighting of the CPs. The weighting makes a big difference to the success of the effect. 7) If all is well save this action and do a shaded render so that you can inspect it better.

Ernest, if you look at the BVH rig you should notice that all the mouth parts have their pivot point at the same spot, which is roughly the centre of the head and centred vertically on the mouth. There is nothing to stop you having them elsewhere but as the BVH data is simply the rotation data for the bones, (filtered through Luuk's smoothing and enforcement routines), your rig will be affected by the placement of it's pivot points. Also, if you study the hierarchy of the BVH bones in the Project Workspace you will see that the head bone is a child of the neck bone and all the rest of the bones are children of the head bone. You can very quickly build your own simple face rig to constrain to the BVH rig.

Thanks, Barshow and Dennis. Dennis, my timing and mouth shapes are out of synch in many places. I should have rehearsed more. TheJobe, I have only just managed to sort out my internet connection and have just downloaded your song. Very nice and quite appropriate as a test for Zign Track. It will be a few days before I will be able to do the video for the tracking but I would be grateful if you could email me, or PM me, with any details that you would like to be placed in the credits. Thanks again. Paul

Yeeaaaah! Okay, I'm getting that tattooed to the inside of my eyelids! I will fix it. --------------- Edit: thejobe, thankyou for the offer of your song. I have been trying to download it but my connection keeps cutting out. Thank goodness the contract with my ISP is about to expire! I am definitely jumping ship. I will try again later.

Here is another test of Zign Track: Silent Song 2 I had to strip out the sound for copyright reasons. Anyone got a song that they want to donate for testing purposes? :)All your music fully credited on any videos distributed. These will only be shown on YouTube, GoogleVideo or on my website but it may give you a bit of exposure that you wouldn't otherwise get and people can be directed to your own website. I guess I'll go back to dialogue. ----------------------------------------- Edit: Is it just me or is the internet slowing down? (It must be my ISP). I tried to put this up on YouTube but my connection kept cutting out during the upload. ----------------------------------------- Edit 2: Hooray! I managed to fix my internet connection! I have replaced the video that the link above points to because there was a spelling mistake, as pointed out by Luuk in the post below. Now there is no more guessing what the song actually is.

Thanks, Al. No, I don't touch the BVH rig at all. I just start with a neutral pose and apply the constraints using compensate.

Yikes! I knew that. Sorry about that. All corrected now.

Thanks, Luuk! No, I mean, THANKS, LUUK! Without your software and A:M working well together I wouldn't be having all this fun. I'm going to post Zign Track tests to YouTube to save Hash Inc disc space and to hopefully promote this great tool. Zign Track Testing #1 (That is just the same video as the one above. I will just post future tests to YouTube).

Here is another test for Zign Track: Sorry about the size! I need to test whether using an MP3 audio track reduces the file size by much. This was just a wav file converted to 8 bit mono. Once again only the eye movements have been added. Everything else is direct from Zign Track's BVH data. I have increased the enforcement for the eyebrows and the bottom lip to add some exaggeration though. I found that I had problems with the head jolting about for one frame every second and then I discovered that there were lots of subframes in the channels of the BVH Action Object. It seems that if you recapture BVH data into a BVH Action Object that the old data remains on subframes. How the subframes got there in the first place is a mystery though. Deleting all the data, except frame 0, from the Action Object before recapturing sorted the problem. (Just one to watch if you notice unexplainable jerks in your BVH movies). I will watch for this and if it keeps showing up I will report it to A:M Reports. Beta 6 has been released and Zign Track continues to improve.

Big thanks, David! Okay. A common base action with the rig constrained to a BVH rig ready for capturing the BVH data. This forms a template for all future BVH Actions. All new BVH data is imported into this action and saved with a new name. That works for me too. Now, to create my setup action from my current action, (in order to avoid having to reset all my constraints), can I just delete the captured data for the rig and save as "BVH_Setup.act" or will I have to start again with a new action and setup all the constraints again? --------- Edit: Sorry, I missed your post, Luuk. What is the "import sequence" function?

Now here's an idea for a useful plugin, or a post process for Zign Track: BVH2AMAct (BVH to A:M Action) The idea would be to run a BVH file through this plugin which would analise the data for each bone and would create an Action file with key frames, filtering out any movements that fell within user defined limits for each marker/bone. This would generate a smaller file and would make post editing much easier and native to A:M. In the meantime BVH is good!

I'll keep this short because my internet connection keeps cutting out and I have just lost one lengthy message that I posted here. First, thanks for the compliments! Al, your example is terrific! I won't post any shots of my old mug on these forums if I can help it. All motion in that movie is direct from Zign Track with the exception of the eyeballs and eyelids. Absolutely no adjustments made. The error in the bottom lip was caused by markers jumping to the wrong feature when they overlapped. Because all of Zign Track's markers are the same colour it wasn't obvious by scrubbing through the video. Maybe each feature could be given a distinct marker? The upper lip problem occurs where I performed a very contorted pucker pose with my mouth which pushed the lips forward and up. Because Zign Track is naturally unable to handle this forward/back motion from a single camera the result looks rather strange but I am fairly confident that by adding fore/back pose sliders for top and bottom lips that this can be made to work without too much extra animating. I would like to know how to swap a BVH file in an Action. Does anyone know how to do this? I fixed the errant markers for the bottom lip and exported a new BVH file which imported into A:M14 but when I attempted to swap shortcuts in the Action A:M seemed to freeze and I had to quit via the task manager. Any ideas? Sometime over the next few days I will stick those dots back on my face and give Zign Track something better to work with. I will try to keep track of times taken for each part of the process so that you can get a clear picture of what to expect to put in for what you get out.

Here is a rough example of some tracking that I achieved with Beta 4 of Zine Track. (Sorry, there's no sound with this test.) I had a few problems, mostly because the video sample that I used would have been a bit of a challenge for any motion tracker so I had to do quite a bit of manual tracking where the motion was too fast or where markers became obscured or hidden. Also I just quickly rigged this head and it could also use another spline in the forehead. There are two or three places where the lips move to very strange poses. This is due to fact that forward/backward motion cannot be tracked. Any puckering of the lips or puffing of the cheeks will need assistance from a pose slider, or something, to get the forward/back motion. Which brings me to my question: What is the best approach to cleaning up animation like this? I suppose I bake the action and then just tweak the bones on the problematic frames? My next test will include sound and I will start with a video that is a little friendlier for Zign Track to handle. And guess what....? Luuk has just released version1 to the testers and my quick test has shown it to be much faster and much more accurate right out of the box! I fed it some of the same horrible video that I gave up on previously and it just grabbed onto those markers and tracked about 600 frames in a few seconds. Brilliant! Luuk, you're magic!

That does look good! I would be tempted to put some finger and toe wiggling in there and also have the boat bob about a little, especially when he shifts his weight. Go on. Give it another pollish.