The winners of the Crunchies Award 2008 were finally announced. Check them out: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/

The Crunchies award celebrates the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

This is sort of little more advanced, but can be really helpful when you need a basic mocap animation to work from. However, first and foremost I write this down for myself, so I don't forget it again.

What do we want to do?

We want to transfer an animation from a Character Studio Biped (.bip) onto our customized/extended human Puppetshop Rig.

Huuhh?

Puppetshop is a cool and powerful rigging plugin by Lumonix. They also developed some other fine plugins like ShaderFX or SkinFX.You can download a demo full version from their homepage by entering your email adress. For this tutorial, however, you need a registered version of Puppetshop (cause we use the Export function).

What do I need?

1. 3DS Max 8+
2. Registered version of Puppetshop (well, not anymore - it's free)
3. Some .bip animation files
4. A character rigged with the default human skeleton from Puppetshop. It also works when you use the default human rig as a starting point and modify it from there. Be sure not to make any big changes to the hierarchy, though.

Let's get started

1. Drag up a fresh Biped next to your rigged character
2. Create a new Puppet and load the default human rig (Human_v101.XMP)
3. Press Setup to create the rig
4. Select any Puppetnode (there should be 2 in the scene at this point: 1 from the puppet we just created and 1 from your own rigged character)
5. Under File => Mocap Advanced hit the export button and chose Export a Biped to BVH
6. This brings up Puppetshops "Biped Thief". Select the root-node of the biped in the 3ds Max Hierarchy-List (press H)
7. Save the BVH
8. Under the normal Motion Capture tab press Import and chose Import Human BVH
9. Select the BVH you saved 2 steps before and import it

Bruce Hahne was so nice to convert all the free Mocap data from Carnegie Mellon University to the BVH file format. Motion retargetting with Motion Builder is supposed to be much easier now - cheers Bruce!

Here is his site:
http://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion

The complete list of motions:
http://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion/bvh-conversion-release---motions-list

Installation

• In the top menu go to: Extensions -> Install/Uninstall.
• Click Upload Package File.
• Select plg_rokbox-system_1.3.zip from your local drive. (Updated)
  
• Click Upload & Install button.

Repeat all the steps for plg_rokbox-content_1.2.zip aswell. (Updated)

Yay - RokBox is now installed!

 

Customization

To customize the plugins, go to Extensions -> Plugin Manager: "System - RokBox" and "Content - RokBox" are in the list there.

 

Implementation

The complete RokBox Documentation can be found here.
The general syntax for usage within your site is {rokboxx}{/rokboxx} (without the 2nd x)

• Thumbnail: thumb=|path/image.ext|
• Link as Text: text=|your textlink| - this doesn't work together with thumbnails
• Album: album=|albumtitle|
• Description: title=|title :: description|
• Size in pixels: size=|x y|

You can also use thumb, album, title, and textlink in the same tag.

Example

{rokboxx album=|myalbum| thumbcount=|1|}images/rocks/roll_*{/rokboxx}

Ever wanted an easier way to take screenshots from websites than pressing the 'print' key, starting up Photoshop (or even Paint *gahh!*), pasting the image and saving it out as jpg?

Here is your answer: Screengrab! Firefox Extension.
Or install it right now.