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Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windows

PostPosted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 11:40 pm
by Shaba1
I just need something that will tell me how many frames a bvh animation is BEFORE I import it into blender so that I can adjust the blender timeline. As it is any frames beyond what you have the blender timline set to just get cut off. As if they are not in the file. I know this becasue I tried importing a bvh and it did not look right so I lengthen out tha timeline from the default 250 frames to 500 frame and reimported the same file from scratch and viola there were more frames.

I have BVHacker. It works but the screen for it opens up full screen on my laptop and cannot be resize( I have tired) so the bottom of the screen where the number of frames of the .bvh file is cut off.

I have tried avimator and qvavimator. Both of them crash at random times.

Re: Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windo

PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2020 8:50 pm
by RobBaer
FWIW, like you, I just change the end frame to a huge number temporarily. Most of the Window programs I used are not as good as the defunct BVHhacker and are not worth the energy IMHO.

Re: Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windo

PostPosted: Tue Mar 17, 2020 6:55 pm
by punkduck
Shaba1 wrote:I just need something that will tell me how many frames a bvh animation is BEFORE I import it into blender so that I can adjust the blender timeline.


Oh I did not see this. But the solution is not that complicated.

bvh files are ASCII afaik. Starting with the description of the skeleton, then a line with the number of frames (n) and then n lines with the values needed for rotation etc. (so one per frame)

For linux it is easy, simply use cli:

Code: Select all
grep "Frames" *.bvh
Human_Bike_DW_3.bvh:Frames:   1313
Human_CWheels_DW_1_short.bvh:Frames:   4194
Human_CWheels_DW_2.bvh:Frames:   1421
Human_Hoop_Roll_DW_1.bvh:Frames:   797
Human_Run_DW.bvh:Frames:   281
TPose_DW.bvh:Frames:   26


If you only need to know this then also for windows there must be something similar to search for the text "Frames" ... maybe on CLI or maybe in a filebrowser. So for that task you only need a tool for searching a specified text.

Re: Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windo

PostPosted: Tue Mar 17, 2020 8:22 pm
by loki1950
On Windows try notepad++ a very good text editor which should handle ASCII quite easily.

Enjoy the Choice :)

Re: Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windo

PostPosted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:50 pm
by sschmidt4
You can open the .bvh file in any plaintext editor (Notepad++ or the like) and the frame count should be just a few lines down ;)

Re: Does anyone know of a FREE bvh reading program for windo

PostPosted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 4:43 am
by loki1950
Bvhacker is still available for download and works well under WINE on Linux though it has not been updated since Windows 7 so compatibility with Windows 10 is questionable.

Enjoy the Choice :)