BVH Importer Script

By Jeroen Hoolmans

License

BVH Importer script for Maya. Copyright (C) 2012 Jeroen Hoolmans

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Introduction

When working with motion capture data you may come across .bvh files. These files are BioVision Hierarchy files (http://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html) that hold skeletal information and frame by frame animation.

This script is used to directly import the .bvh files and create a joint structure when needed. No need to load this file inside of MotionBuilder or equivalent and export it to a Maya supported format like FBX.

Installation

Since this is a python script you can easily run the script from a python tab inside the script editor. But if you are frequently using this script I recommand installing the script in the Maya scripts folder.

Windows:

C:\Users\<username>\Documents\maya\<version>\scripts\

Mac OSX:

/Users/Shared/Autodesk/maya/<version>/scripts/

Linux:

/home/<username>/maya/<version>/scripts/

When the script is in place, launch or restart Maya. Go to your script editor, open a Python tab and run the following code:

import bvh_importer
bvh_importer.BVHImporterDialog()

Enjoy!

Contribution

Helping me develop this script even further is highly appreciated!

Some ways of contributing:

• Report any bugs by going to Issues.
• Request features at Issues, click 'New Issue' then add the label 'feature request'.

Developers can Fork this repo at GitHub

• Create a new branch called 'feature name'.
• Make your changes.
• Do a Pull Request and get some coffee!

Contact

Any questions related to this script can also be posted at Issues. I will get to you as soon as possible!