Using multiple fbx anims with agents

[haggi]

Hi there. I have a problem using fbx animations with my crowd agents. I downloaded characters from mixamo.com and several animations from the same source as fbx files. Now I want to use these fbx animations for my agents. What I tried is to load the fbx files in the agentClip node but that does not work. I suppose because the names of the joins/points is different, e.g. the agents skeleton is named like this: mixamorig9_Head whereas the same node in the fbx is called: mixamorig12:Head. Then I thought it could be a good idea to rename the points and I used a fbxAnimImport, renamed the points, added a motionclip node and used this as input for my agentClip node what seems to work. But to be honest, this seems to be a little bit complicated and I wanted to be sure I'm doing the right thing or if these is a simper way to use fbx files with agents especially if I want to use the same fbx anims for a few more agents. Or maybe I simply do not have the correct workflow yet, I'm still learning crowds.

[Gr6g]

Hi there,

I am doing a massive crowd shot at the moment, with 9 agents and 11 clips, all from Mixamo. I ran into the same issue as you and found the reason : it's the namespace causing the trouble (the mixamorig: there is before all the joints).

Basically, for a reason I don't know, when downloading an FBX from Mixamo, it adds a unique namespace to both the agent Skeleton and clip Skeleton, but not to the geo.

Say you downloaded Megan as an agent, only the clips applied to Megan on Mixamo will work on her in Houdini. If you want them to work on Adam, you'll have to download the same clips applied on Adam on Mixamo.

The work around I found was to open the agents and clips in Maya, remove the namespace, then export them again as FBX.

 

Once I had done that, all the clips worked on all the agents.

I'm sure there is a more clever way to do the same in Houdini, but my knowledge of it is limited!

Hope that helps,