Hi, I'm a newbie using Ipi Mocap Studio and the experience is being great so far. I followed each step of the User Guide for Multiple PSEye Cameras and I've been able to export a perfectly animated skeleton into Maya easily... but there is where problems starts.

I tried to use that animated skeleton into a few characters I've already rigged in Maya (using HumanIK and all that bone-defining stuff) and the result was an animation pretty screwed up in all of them (you know, deformed mesh, arms pointing to the sky, crossed legs and some other funny things) The User Guide is great until you arrive to this point... there, it only redirects you to a few tutorials that don't say too much. This is the one I followed:

http://vimeo.com/57823600

and I'm far from reaching those decent results.

Searching for help on the internet I realized that it has something to do with the orient rotation of the joints on my rigged characters. So to assure that I just opened a new file, imported the FBX animated rigging, defined the bones, generated a new skeleton with HumanIK and doing nothing more than that I connected the 2 skeletons and guess what? The animation end up being screwed up as well. This is so weird because I checked the orient rotation of the joints of both skeletons and they're both the same... X axis are facing to the right direction, y axis facing up and z axis facing front.

I feel like I'am missing something here. I read about a program named animeeple but IDK, I just want to know what do you guys do at this point of your animation... what is your workflow?

Sorry for my bad english.

Hi, Just wondering if you tried zeroing all bone rotations on your rig in Maya first, rt click bone and click zero rotation.

You stated you did characterize your custom character skeleton first or you really can't continue.

Maybe try creating a control rig on your character to be driven by the mocap data or visa verse.

Things should just work fine if you followed the proper characterization process and drive your character from the mocap skeleton.

If you have 3DS Max, its easy to use a biped and put an orientation constraint, under animations tab, on your custom characters bones to hook the biped to it, there

may be tutorials on youtube, since there is a bit more setup than that needed, but not much.

This way you can just load your bvh file onto a biped figure only, do correcting if wanted, then save as a BIP file and when reopened on your character it will just snap

to the file data and appear on your character.

If you don't have 3DS Max 2010 or up, then try the first step in Maya to zero all needed bone rotations of your rig first, even if you think they are correct now.

Other than that, I can't help without a lot more specified on the issue.

Thank you, I created a control rig (the default one that generates HumanIK) and now the two skeletons move simultaneously. The only thing is that the rigged characters I already have are no good for mocap I think... but well, I will always use HumanIK generated skeleton from now on. It saves you a lot of time.

You should be able to control any skeleton by the mocap skeleton its self also, as long as both are defined and able to be locked, then you can characterize them as biped, you will get character and character1, (you can rename them too), you just make the mocap skeleton control the character.

Motion builder only knows what you tell it, but if you like control rigs and it works, then great, but I don't think your character rigs are fine for mocap, the rig doesn't really matter as long as it's defined and characterized with at least the base bones, sometimes you may have to add in, (in the bones list), some extra bones if they are not picked up, but the more you work with MB you will get it :)

Good Luck!