Match biped to skeleton (max question)

[Tjakalen]

Okay, here's the deal, Say I have a skeleton set up, but for some reason I need to use a c-studio biped to animate. How can I match all the joints of the biped to the exact location of the skeleton joints?

I thought I'd be able to just align them, but working with biped in figure-mode only allow me to scale bones. I really don't like working with C-studio skeletons :(, but I do not have a choice in this.

Edit: I've discovered a solution that works, it has a high probability to drive one nuts though... Using the 'tape helper' or distance script you can measure the length of each bone in the skeleton. Then using tape helper again measure the bones of the biped, use a calculator to figure out by what factor you need to scale the bone with in order for that bone to get a length of 100 units, scale the bip bone to that scale and then just paste the length of the bone from your target skeleton. I've done the hip and the thigh using this method - I'm seriously looking forward to the fingers, yep, it's gonna be so much fun.

[poopipe]

If you can get your original animation out to bvh without wrecking the bone orientations then load it onto a biped (with the correct skeleton topology) it will resize the biped to match the bvh (in theory).

That should give you a base to work from


I'l have a quick fiddle in the meantime - if i dont get back to you it didn't work ;)

[Tjakalen]

That would be awesome, but sadly I do not have access to a .bvh exporter. all animation is done by hand so I need one to get a bvh file in the first place.

[poopipe]

does CAT come with a bvh exporter? it did many years ago before it was integrated (I don't have 2011 installed to check)

motionbuilder should do the job if you have access (again, it used to ) failing that you can be pretty certain somebody's done something for blender.