Retarget BVH - Source rig for IClone

[BoorayJenkins]

Thomas,

I’d like to retarget iClone body & facial animations exported from iClone / 3DXchange as BVH onto Genesis 8 characters brought in via Diffeo. Could this rig be added?

[Thomas Larsson]

Could you provide me with an example bvh file so I can test.

[BoorayJenkins]

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[BoorayJenkins]

Also I noticed looking in the .json files there isn’t any finger mapping or face mapping. I’m curious if there’s a way to get all of that from iClone onto a Daz3d character in Blender.

[Thomas Larsson]

The main development of this plugin was a decade ago, and I didn’t have access to bvh files with fingers at the time. But adding fingers should be relatively straightforward, so we will see what happens. It is unlikely that something can be done with face bones, since there is no standard face rig, and I guess that the iclone and daz face rigs are not compatible. However, the FACS system is an industry standard, so if you can export the facial animation in Facecap or LiveLink formats you can import them with the buttons in the FACS Units panel.

https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/02/facecap-test.html

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[BoorayJenkins]

I found a blender plugin called Rigimap that can retarget iClone (Actor Core) animations from FBX to Rigify. I’m able to export the FBX from iClone to blender and everything looks perfect including face animations. However, retargeting to the Diffeo Rigify has the following issues: no facial animation, shoulder bones rotated inward a bit, and the root is moving quite a bit causing the whole character’s offset to move.

[Alessandro Padovani]

As for the face rig diffeomorphic doesn’t use rigify but the daz rig, this way it can import facial poses from daz. The conversion from the daz face rig to rigify is not supported.

[BoorayJenkins]

So this plugin I tried as well but had issues. It claims to be able to retarget BVH against anything specifically including iClone to the Daz rig. I couldn’t follow as the rig looks different from Diffeo (tried the rigify option and the Daz rig option in Diffeo).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTH1iMDh8E&ab_channel=cgvirus

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[Alessandro Padovani]

You may try this.

https://github.com/Mwni/blender-animation-retargeting

I never retargeted iclone to rigify myself though.

[Thomas Larsson]

The armature in the test file is a standard G8 armature. If you just run the retargeter, the rig should be identified automatically. Or you can go to the Source Armature panel and Identify Source Rig explicitly. The result should be Genesis 3,8.

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[Thomas Larsson]

However, when running the retargeter in Blender 3.1 I got lots of error messages because the plugin attempts to assign floating point values to the current frame, which apparently was allowed in previous versions of Blender. The last commit casts frame numbers to ints explictly.

[Alessandro Padovani]

I know nothing about the api but fractional frames should be allowed especially to deal with NLA where animations can be stretched in time.

https://developer.blender.org/T30240

[Thomas Larsson]

Yes, I agree. Now frame numbers are only cast to integers if using floats cause type errors.