Having models with built-in animations isn’t an option for my project.
I need unanimated models in .dae, .obj or .glb being animated on the fly through a .bvh animation.
You pick an animation dynamically and that is played animating your avatar.
I can’t find any example anywhere! At 3js website the best i could find is an example of a bvh animation being played directly oO.
Is it even achievable? I have to ask because it seems like I’m the only one in the whole galaxy thinking of using bvh animations on a model dynamically in a scene!
The feature you are looking for is called Animation Retargeting. It requires that the BVH and your character models use the same skeleton or skeletons with similar bone structures. If this precondition is not given, you probably won’t get usable results.
There is currently no official example that demonstrates retargeting. However, SkeletonUtils provides some (undocumented) utility functions for retargeting.
Sorry about the lack of support in this area but most users embedd their animations directly in the model assets. Retargeting was not often requested in the past.
It’s also possible to put standalone animations into FBX or glTF files. Probably also DAE, but I haven’t seen it done before. This would require some custom work, both to create and load the files, and a fair bit of understanding of the animation you want to load…