I'm trying to rotate a walking animation. It's stored as motion capture data in a BVH file (download an example here), and then loaded into Blender as a moving armature. What I would like is to be able to (manually) edit the animation. My approach so far was:
- Load the BVH.
- Move the armature object (so in Object mode) such that at frame #1 it's at the origin.
- Rotate the object around the origin (so still in Object mode), such that the walking animation is aligned with the X-axis.
- Press [Ctrl]+[A] to apply the location + rotation.
This last step doesn't do what I want. Rather than modifying the animation data, it modifies the armature itself. When I go to edit mode, I see that the edit bones have been changed (see before/after image).
Since I have multiple BVH files with multiple motions, this is a problem. Since the motion data itself isn't changed, it's impossible to use the aligned animations as actions, and I cannot link those edited actions to a single armature.
My question to you: how do I apply my alignment (rotations & translations) to the animation data (i.e. the root bone translation/rotation), while keeping the armature itself unchanged?
Sybren
PS: I've also asked this question at BlenderArtists. I'll make sure that if there is a solution posted here, I'll update my post there, and vice versa.