[Opensim-users] Converting the Carnegie Mellon Animations?

[Karen Palen]

 Thank you for the 3ds Max info, it is the closest thing that I have seen to
an actual specification so far.

One of the enduring problems in this field is lack of formal definitions of
file formats and the resultant spread of disjoint (and often pointless)
dialects.

These examples illustrate the resultant problem.

You are correct in pointing out that the example I posted is not XML,
however several dialects at least claim to be!

This gets really scary when a Google search reveals thousands of hits, many
of them in advanced Medical applications. None of which really define what
they actually trying to read or write apart from the reference to the now
defunct Biovision. Sigh.

At lunch recently several of us "old time software engineers" were
speculating on Toyota'a accelerator problems and agreed that one likely
cause was poorly specified software interfaces. Almost all cars now use a
common bus with a subset of the old MSDOS network (with a new fancy name).
There were almost a dozen examples of this kind of problem cited from
Aviation "fly by wire" systems, one requiring a reboot of the flight
controls after takeoff! I just hope that none of my old code was the cause
of any of these.

I agree that the binary version seems to be simply the internal
representation of the file with some added (and mostly unknown) data added.

I plan to continue to "pick away" at this since seems like it might solve
some of my problems. I want a series of quite similar animations based on a
common root. Keeping the bookkeeping straight with the internal animation
and the original BVH file is proving to be a hassle.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Karen

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Marcus Llewellyn <
marcus.llewellyn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I found a link that has some info on the BVH format, and I'll place the URL
> at the end of this message. This particular document describes how 3DS Max
> handles BVH files, but all the relevant info is in there. It's not a very
> complex format (and it's not XML btw).
>
> I'm assuming that the binary version was something cooked up by LL, and
> probably just removes all of the textual information in favor of expecting
> joint rotation and offset data to be there in a predetermined order,
> followed by the frame data.
>
> Anyhoo, here's the link:
>
>
> http://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/3dsmax-friendly-release-of-cmu-motion-database/3dsmax-bvh-import-specification
>
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