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Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Motion Builder - Create a bone template to characterize many different BVH files

1. First make sure your BVH has a tpose on the opening frame (see tutorial)

2. Then in your asset browser templates>characters> drag "character" onto the hip bone of your BVH. and select characterize.

It will try to match motion builder bone names to the skeleton but it can't so a list of all bones that don't match will appear.Go ahead and take note of these and close that popup.

3. Now under "Characters" in the navigator you now can double click "character" and then select the "character definition" Tab to the right. You may need to expand the "base" section of bones.




In the mapping list you can see bones that it managed to automatically map when you dragged the character onto your BVH bones. You now need to map the remaining bones to the unmapped locations.



Up in the top right you should see your character body with green bones for the ones that properly mapped and the ones that didn't work.


4. Now let's link the remaining bones. To do this you select a bone on your BVH by clicking once. Then hold "x" on the keyboard and drag down to the bone you want to link it to in the mapping list. Pay attention to the name of the bone you select (selected bone name should show in the bottom right of your viewer window when selected) and make sure a right arm is linked to a right arm in the mapping field.


Map at least as many bones are in the base"required" bones group category.

5.When complete press the Extract Naming Template" button in the right side of that mapping box you've been using.


It will ask if you want to update the template press yes.

Now the mapping list items will fill in the naming template slots in the Character definition tab.


Now select your character in the navigator

6. Goto file and "save selection"

Your template will be saved as a .fbx files containing the naming conventions used on the skeleton you created it from.

Disable any takes that it may try to export in the Save selection options that will comes up when you try to save.

You now have a template you can apply to other BVH files that have the EXACT same bone naming convention as your template.

Go to the next tutorial to see how to apply this template!

Applying your Bone template to the t-posed BVH file.