Importing BVH files into Blender Rigify-ied rig with MakeWalk

Did anyone mention that animating is really, really hard? Rigging a character in Blender is pretty straight-forward, even if you do it yourself. With just a few mouse clicks, you can easily Rigify a character, and have full IK/FK support. Moving limbs and waving arms around is pretty simple stuff.

But creating a realistic animation - making the character look like a real, living, breathing thing, rather than a stiff, robotic puppet - is really hard. Plus, for some poses, FK (forward kinematics) is ideal. But for some poses, IK is preferable. And getting Blender to play nicely, as you switch from one to the other, is a bit of a nightmare.

Luckily, there's a (relatively) easy solution: BVH.
And ever since the first Microsoft Kinect (originally for XBox) hit the market, indie game developers have had access to a nice, easy, cheap(ish) motion capture device.

The Kinect For Windows package is now discontinued, but you can still use a Kinect One for XBox and a PC connection cable to get the same result.

The cable costs more than the Kinect (though both can be bought online for around £40 if you look carefully). So, of course, we snagged a few and looked at how we can use them for our animations.

While we're waiting for them to arrive, we took a look at BVH animation in Blender. There are quite a few software packages that work with the Kinect One to create BVH animations (we'll try a few out when the hardware actually arrives) - so in the meantime, we thought it best to look at how to use BVH files with our rigged character in Blender.

It turns out, it's actually quite easy to import BVH animations into Blender - simply download the MakeHuman Blender tools, and activate the MakeWalk plug-in in your Blender project.

Then load your character, complete with rig (either a hand-carved rig or a Rigify generated one) and when in pose mode the MakeWalk tab should appear in the Tools panel on the left of the screen (assuming a default pane layout in Blender)

Hit the "load and retarget" button and hey presto! Your character takes on the BVH animation.

If your character stubbornly remains in the t-pose position, use the play/frame advance tools to move through each frame of the animation. If there are no frames of animation in the timeline, check your console for import errors.

Now that was easy. But it's not the end of things. Most BVH files are massively wasteful. They key just about every bone, location and rotation on just about every frame. And there are also a couple of frames where "glitchy" poses appear.

Even for an energetic ballet dance move, something doesn't look quite right in this frame!

So there's a bit of tidying up to do. But, in general, it's a quick and easy way to get a basic animation into Blender. We usually just flick through the animation and where any one frame looks particularly out of place, simply remove that keyframe. As long as there is a decent keyframe before and after the offending frame (or frames, you can get away with deleting up to 5-10 consecutive frames before it's noticable) you should be ok. Looking at the dope sheet however, shows us a slightly different story:

Wow! That's a lot of keyframe information.

Probably about 90% of this keyframe information is unnecessary (that's just a guess - plucked a number completely out of thin air). But given that Blender (and, eventually, our target platform Unity) will automatically tween between two poses, what we really need to do is grab just the pertinent frames of action - keep the main key poses between actions, and let Blender fill in the gaps, rather than force our model into a set pose on every single frame.

With our animation, we found that the first 21 frames were basically the same pose - the actor in the BVH mo-cap studio obviously readying themselves to perform the action. So we kept frame one and frame 22 and deleted all the other frames between these two. The animation played more or less the same, but with only one key pose, instead of 22, at the start of the animation.

Here's the same dope sheet, but with only the important frames kept in - any frames where the character was simply transitioning from one pose into the next, we deleted.

While we're still keying every bone, location and rotation, between frames 1-50 we now have eight fully-keyed frames of animation, instead of fifty. Already that's a massive reduction in animation data.

The playback still looks pretty much the same as the original. A few, tiny, subtle little nuances may be lost. But that's the compromise for getting good, clean, small-sized animation data; something we're happy to live with.

The only issue with this approach is that it boring. Repetitive and boring.
Now animation isn't hard. Just tedious!