Copy/Transfer Animation keys to another figure

Dondec

Since I can't seem to Copy or Paste animation keys from one timeline to another, is there any way (including use of some external plugin) to transfer animation keys from one figure to another (in this case V4.2 to Genesis). Sure hope I missed something. Thanks as always! :)

- Don

Fenric

Hm.... I have a "Pose Transfer" product, but I have to say that I never tried it with Genesis. I will try it now....

No. V4 to Genesis does not work.

Dondec

NLA comes close, but I think I see the problem. The bone names are different in Genesis so the NLA I created for V4 only partially transfers. The differently named bones get no keys from the NLA track. Interesting.

Fenric, got any code to rename bones? :)

Fenric

Worse than the names, the rotation amounts and limits are different. Even if you fix the names, you have to fix the weightings... which change for each character...

sorry, but no.

I'll leave that up to someone with more patience and ambition than me.

Dondec

I typed "poser genesis retarget" in Google. Not a complete solution, but... haha, as usual... the beginnings of one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA9sslLCGiI#t=13

- Don

Dartanbeck

True, there may be some discrepancies in the NLA transfer... requiring some tweaking.
One thing you may want to try, instead of actually using the clip as-is, is to simply place the clip with the animation information into the Clips tray (right, lower tray), but do not actually add it to the new timeline.
Select the Genesis figure (or is it "Actor"? I don't recall off-hand... which ever one includes the NLA tab on the right tray), go to the NLA tab and use the "Load Clip Data" button, which will actually inject the keyframes onto the timeline, instead of a clip block. This frees you up to edit the incorrect and/or missing keys.

Now, since you're attempting to transfer 'from' V4 'to' Genesis, there may be a more accurate work-around, if you're interested:
Using Fenric's PZ2/BVH transfer tool, load in your V4 with the animation applied and export it as a PZ2 animated pose file, into a Poser runtime "Pose" library, as you would for any Poser pose file - for use in DS or Poser.

Now go into DS and see if you can load the animated pose onto Genesis. If not, load it onto V4 in DS.
Next, use aniMate 2 (I think you need the paid version for this, but the free one might work too) to "Bake" the timeline into an aniBlock.
Now apply that aniBlock to Genesis and use the aniBlock editing tools to edit the aniBlock on Genesis to your liking.
Save the new aniBlock and use the aniBlock importer for Carrara to transfer the keys to Genesis.

I'm not sure how well any of this will work, but these are things that "I" would try.

I recall adding animation information from V4 to Genesis in Carrara 8.5, and not having a big bad time editing it to work. I believe that I've used the first method I mention on top... using the "Load Clip Data" button from an NLA. Again... there's some tweaking required, but I enjoy that part.

If the animation includes keys for every, or nearly every, frame on the timeline, I'll examine the animation to find the "Key" parts of the motion. Select all Keys, deselect all of them that I've deemed to be the most important, like, every eight frames or so... depending upon the movement and it's timing, and hit "delete", leaving only those "Key" keys along the timeline. Go to each of those spots and 'fix' all of the joints that are needed for the motion - for each and every "Key" key that I've left behind from the mass deletion.
Then I go in between those keys and tweak the joints according to what I need, and so on.

Eventually, doing these sorts of edits will be a huge illustrator to how you can quickly and effectively make your own animations from scratch, simply by rotating the joints and moving the hip along the needed translations... it's fraking fun! :ahhh: