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You can take a look at the Mocapadata.com website. You would probably be amazed to discover that it offers the opportunity to download hundreds of motion capture data sets made by up to three different real actors. The data sets have been splitted in 19 different categories as various as walk, jump, play tennis, baseball or soccer, fight, pose, gesture, and much more. And within each category hide dozens of different data sets expressing clearly identified motions, like Hello, Bye, Election, Salute Head or Salute Chest for the Greeting category.

The content of the website is truly amazing, and many marvels await you during its exploration. Of course, the site is slow. Of course, it is japanese and sometimes, the motions have not been translated and you end with some poetic and mysterious names for them. Of course, some motions are only placeholders, suggesting that the database will keep growing. But hey, it's a so fantastic resource, open sourced and kindly released under Creative Commons By-Sa.

So, now that your dream have come true, what could you do? Just download a few motions, and start Blender. In the top menu, select File > Import > Motion Capture (.bvh). Browse to the location where you stored your mocaps and then import one of them.

import float panel

The floating panel with the import options

The BVH Importer offers you different options, among which the possibility to import As Armature or As Empties. Importing as armature is a good option if you just want to test how good the motion is, and if you don't have (yet) a fully rigged character to play with. You will perhaps have to correct the size of the newly created armature and more probably its rotation (RotX 90.000 looks mandatory). Then orientate your 3D view so that you see correctly the armature with a little perspective and finally [Ctrl]+[A] to run the animation. Beware, some motions could be quite long. So, don't forget to set End in the Anim panel, Scene buttons [F10] to a higher value than 250 (the portrayed motions lasts almost 750 frames, for example).

animated armature

One of the imported .bvh within the default Blender Animation Screen showing the IPO Curves for the Pose mode

Feel impressed? It's just the start of the trip. Now browse the Web and fetch the Ludwig or Mancandy rigs. Next time, choose to import Empties instead of (or along with) Armatures, and check the documentation to see how you can use Empties in order to constrain the motions of an existing rig.

Edit: Import As Empties looks broken/buggy at the moment, with the script bundled in Blender 2.44. It should be corrected in Blender 2.45.

More links to Mocap data sets or utilities :

If you find more interesting ones, especially those with an explicit licence next to free, please post in the comments, I'll update my post.

As a final note, I'll just remember you that Skinny, an automatic mesh generation, rigging and UV mapping from armatures exists, as already discussed on Blendernation and could have funny uses with the Import BVH script if you don't have a fully rigged character at hand.