Importing Hierarchy

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >

‌Importing Hierarchy ‌

If you have already rigged your mesh in your animation package, you may be able to transport the rig to SynthEyes, saving quite a bit of trouble.

If your animation package can export an FBX file with a Skin deformer, you can export to FBX and read that file into SynthEyes (be sure to turn on Read rigs). The rig and mesh will be transferred, along with the vertex weighting. You'll need to unlock the appropriate joints.

Alternatively, you can use the BVH (Biovision) file format. It's simple and you can see what's in the file (good to interface to custom software), but it does not contain vertex weighting. Here's the workflow to do that:

 Create a scene in your animation package that has your mesh and rig in their reference position on the first frame, with the mesh's pivot located at the origin.

 Write the mesh as an Alias/Wavefront OBJ file.

 Write a BVH file, starting at that first reference frame. Any additional frames will be ignored.

 In SynthEyes, use File/Import/Mesh to read the OBJ file.

 Use File/Import/BVH Reference Pose to read the BVH file, causing it to build the hierarchy.

 (If the setup didn't wasn't located at the origin or is otherwise not aligned right, realign the mesh to the rig now.)

 In the Hierarchy View, drag the imported mesh to be parented by the newly- created root object.

You'll now have a SynthEyes hierarchy that geometrically matches your animation package. You'll still need to continue on in these directions to set up the hierarchy, ie unlocking joints and assigning the various vertices of the mesh to the appropriate GeoH object.

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >