How to retarget animations from BVH files?

yaRnMcDonuts · February 2, 2021, 4:45pm

I am working on improving the animations for my game while upgrading to the new animation system, and I am looking to find the best way to retarget animations between 2 different skeletons.

It is looking like the Maud editor will be my best choice - I recall a long time ago seeing a video using Maud to retarget animations, but I did not bookmark it, and I cannot seem to find it again unfortunately. I tried to retarget an animation by trial and error a few weeks ago, but I got stuck on the bone mapping step.

I am also curious if animation retargeting is supported for the new animation system? Or if I should retarget my animations using the old anim system and then migrate to the new system afterwards.

Ali_RS · February 2, 2021, 6:43am

Maybe this helps, it’s for the old animation system, so you need to do the migration afterward I think.

In my case I retarget BVH animations to a T posed dummy character in Blender and export it as Gltf then in JME I load that dummy character and retarget animations from him to my other characters. For example you can use sgold Wes library to do it.

github.com

stephengold/Wes/blob/958fe3d211fdd04972e5c7ab1aadbc864b47b0b0/WesLibrary/src/main/java/jme3utilities/wes/AnimationEdit.java#L420


 * Re-target the specified AnimClip from the specified source armature to
 * the specified target armature using the specified map.
 *
 * @param sourceClip which AnimClip to re-target (not null, unaffected)
 * @param sourceArmature (not null, unaffected)
 * @param targetArmature (not null, unaffected)
 * @param map the skeleton map to use (not null, unaffected)
 * @param clipName name for the resulting AnimClip (not null)
 * @return a new AnimClip
 */
public static AnimClip retargetAnimation(AnimClip sourceClip,
        Armature sourceArmature, Armature targetArmature,
        SkeletonMapping map, String clipName) {
    Validate.nonNull(sourceArmature, "source armature");
    Validate.nonNull(targetArmature, "target armature");
    Validate.nonNull(map, "map");
    Validate.nonNull(clipName, "clip name");
    /*
     * Start with an empty AnimClip.
     */
    AnimClip result = new AnimClip(clipName);

sgold · February 2, 2021, 4:43pm

Maud editor project
Wes library
YouTube demo videos from 2017:
- part 1: Maud update - Sept. 1, 2017 - YouTube (15:02)
- part 2: Maud update - Sept. 3, 2017 - YouTube (28:22)

The new animation system is supported, but not in any release, so you’ll have to build Maud from source.