Defining The Target Rig Manually

Internally, the BVH Retargeter retargets animations to an armature with the following bone hierarchy.

• hips
• spine
  • spine-1
    • chest
      • chest-1
        • neck
          • head
        • shoulder.L
          • upper_arm.L
            • forearm.L
              • hand.L
        • shoulder.R
          • upper_arm.R
            • forearm.R
              • hand.R
• thigh.L
  • shin.L
    • foot.L
      • toe.L
• thigh.R
  • shin.R
    • foot.R
      • toe.R

In order to retarget to an armature with different bone names, we must define a map between the given bones and the internal names. By default, the BVH Retargeter attempts to do this automatically. However, automatic bone mapping may easily be confused for non-trivial rigs. If this happens, one can define the bone map manually.

A bone map for a target armature is defined by a .json file located in the target_rigs folder under the retarget-bvh directory. The folder already contains several files. These rigs are too complicated to identify the bone map automatically, so the BVH Retargeter recognizes these rigs and use the predefined bone map.