Improving Motion Capture Import & Workflow

by Benjamin Cook for Blender Foundation

Motion capture animation is both faster and at times more realistic than a human animator, but it can hard to work with, for a variety of reasons. While Blender has had BVH import (a popular format for mocap data) for a while, it lacks tools to deal with this type of data properly. My proposal is to provide tools to streamline mocap data into a project’s workflow: conversion to f-curves, cycle and stride bone conversion and most importantly, retargeting the motion to a user-created rig.