Bill,
In step 3, are you talking about creating a new mesh from scratch in MilkShape? What I'm trying to do is use an existing Poser mesh and get it to animate as well as it does in Poser. Have you had luck getting Poser-quality (i.e. Poser's idea of "low-poly") meshes with flesh/clothing to animate well in Blitz?
You mention playing with the weights in CharacterFX: does the .b3d format take weights into account? I'd read that it uses rigid assignments from a single joint rather than multiple weighted ones (and in the case of multiple ones, just assigns the strongest one). I haven't tested this, however. Have you verified that weights are used in .b3d models?
Please reply, even with uncertain findings. If you've found a better way to do any of this, I'd love to learn the details. This is new territory, and I'm just feeling my way along (no doubt making mistakes as I go).
---
As for moving the mesh, rather than moving the skeleton joints, I did a quick redo of Skeleton Man, and it looked much the same animating in Blitz as the first version (though the collarbones seemed a bit off). I also tried redoing Casual Man, quickly assigning mesh groups to joints with the same name in MilkShape, rather than doing vertex assignments in CharacterFX. I'd previously tried this in MilkShape, and while it was *much* faster to create, it didn't look as good: the joints showed right-angle bends rather than smooth curves. While I saw these same artifacts in the redo (as expected), the overall joint movement didn't seem noticably different (which is what I was looking at). So, further testing seems required to verify if moving the BVH skeleton really is a no-no.
In step 3, are you talking about creating a new mesh from scratch in MilkShape? What I'm trying to do is use an existing Poser mesh and get it to animate as well as it does in Poser. Have you had luck getting Poser-quality (i.e. Poser's idea of "low-poly") meshes with flesh/clothing to animate well in Blitz?
You mention playing with the weights in CharacterFX: does the .b3d format take weights into account? I'd read that it uses rigid assignments from a single joint rather than multiple weighted ones (and in the case of multiple ones, just assigns the strongest one). I haven't tested this, however. Have you verified that weights are used in .b3d models?
Please reply, even with uncertain findings. If you've found a better way to do any of this, I'd love to learn the details. This is new territory, and I'm just feeling my way along (no doubt making mistakes as I go).
---
As for moving the mesh, rather than moving the skeleton joints, I did a quick redo of Skeleton Man, and it looked much the same animating in Blitz as the first version (though the collarbones seemed a bit off). I also tried redoing Casual Man, quickly assigning mesh groups to joints with the same name in MilkShape, rather than doing vertex assignments in CharacterFX. I'd previously tried this in MilkShape, and while it was *much* faster to create, it didn't look as good: the joints showed right-angle bends rather than smooth curves. While I saw these same artifacts in the redo (as expected), the overall joint movement didn't seem noticably different (which is what I was looking at). So, further testing seems required to verify if moving the BVH skeleton really is a no-no.