Animation glitches from motion capture import from blender

I’ve been testing out importing motion capture animations and have started with the sample motion capture for Brekel Kinect.

http://brekel.com/kinect-3d-scanner/example-files/

When imported into blender from bvh, it appears clean. I repositioned the motion capture bones so that the feet sit above the X axis, rotated with Z as up and Y as in/out. When I export to fbx, I set Z forward and Y as up. In Unity, I’ve Rigged as Humanoid with avatar set to create from this model. I’ve set animation with root transform as body orientation, root transform position as feet, and root transform position as center of mass.

I’ve tried importing as .blend as well and it fails with an error message saying that blender crashed.

The motion capture appears… mostly right, however, when the arms go behind the head they get zippy and glitch in ways that clearly do not happen in the original motion capture. I thought there might be some rotation going on that is possibly causing the issue but I don’t see it in the motion capture in blender. It’s pretty straightforward and slow moving.

Am I doing something wrong? I haven’t started my own motion capture yet to see if this is a fluke or normal. This is just exploratory before I put any effort into getting my kinect set up for some simple animations.

Hi - it is a little hard to ascertain what ‘clean’ means when you refer to the animation in Blender. Traditionally any motion capture (and especially noisy stuff from Kinnect etc) can require significant clean up and some manual work in the animation package to ensure it is glitch free e.g. sanity checking of the curves and removing rogue key-frames or at least an automated cleanup of some type.

Blender may handle some of this and indeed appear to play back the animations fine, but Unity’s animation import does not necessarily translate all keyframes and interpolation directly but optimises curves at import to make compatible with animation compression and standardise the import - therefore issues not noticed inside Blender may only then become apparent.

The best advice would be to verify your animation clips in a 3rd party animation package or FBX viewer to ensure your FBX exports are what you expect. A trial of 3DS Max or Maya may help - or indeed their 3D viewer.

http://www.autodesk.com/products/fbx/fbx-review

Then make changes / fixes to the curves and re-export as necessary.

If Unity is still struggling to work with your animations at that stage, then please file a bug inside Unity > Help > Report a bug - with your project and follow these instructions to make the fastest turnaround:

You can post the ref number here, to chase up at a later date.