| --- |
| license: other |
| license_name: truebones-terms-of-use |
| license_link: https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC |
| pretty_name: Truebones ZOO Annotations |
| language: |
| - en |
| size_categories: |
| - 1K<n<10K |
| tags: |
| - 3d |
| - animation |
| - motion |
| - animal |
| - fbx |
| - bvh |
| - skeletal-animation |
| - mocap |
| configs: |
| - config_name: animation |
| default: true |
| data_files: animation.csv |
| - config_name: species |
| data_files: species.csv |
| - config_name: clips |
| data_files: clips.csv |
| --- |
| |
| # Truebones ZOO Annotations |
|
|
| Text prompts, per-clip metadata, rest-pose renders and the exact build pipeline for |
| **Truebones ZOO** — **1,097 animal motion clips across 74 skeletons**: mammals, birds, |
| reptiles, insects, marine and prehistoric creatures. 1.02 hours, 111,158 frames, uniformly |
| 30 fps. Rigs range from 9 to 143 joints; clips from 0.3 to 18.5 seconds. |
|
|
| **The motion files themselves are not in this repository.** Truebones ZOO is a commercial |
| library by [Truebones Motions Animation Studios](https://truebones.com) and may not be |
| redistributed. What ships here is everything around the motions — one text prompt per clip, |
| four-view renders of every clip, per-clip and per-species metadata, one rest-pose render per |
| skeleton, and the dependency-free |
| pipeline that rebuilds the exact per-clip dataset from your own purchased copy: buy the library |
| at <https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC>, unpack it here, run four scripts, and `animation/` |
| materialises byte-for-byte (sixteen clips excepted; see below). |
|
|
| ## Structure |
|
|
| ``` |
| animation.csv one row per clip (1,097) |
| animation_prompts.json one text prompt per clip (1,097) |
| animation_frames.json clip -> frame count |
| animation_bones.json species -> its joint names |
| species.csv one row per species (74) |
| species_tpose/<Species>.png one rest-pose render grid per species (74) |
| animation_render/<clip>/ four-view render per clip: MP4 + camera JSON per view (1,097) |
| clips.csv one row per source file (2,447), mapped onto animation/ |
| excluded.csv source files no importer reads (1) |
| scripts/pipeline|probes the build pipeline and the format readers |
| |
| animation/<Species>-<Action>.fbx not included — rebuilt from your purchased copy (see below) |
| animation_glb/ not included — the same clips as GLB, converted locally |
| Truebone_Z-OO/<Group>/… not included — the original commercial download |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Rebuilding `animation/` |
|
|
| Purchase Truebones ZOO from <https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC> and unpack it next to |
| these files as `Truebone_Z-OO/`, one folder per animal group, layout and names as shipped. |
| Then run the pipeline — pure Python 3, no dependencies: |
|
|
| ```bash |
| cd scripts |
| python3 pipeline/build_dataset.py # 1. index the download -> ../clips.csv |
| python3 pipeline/normalize.py # 2. name every clip -> ../clips.csv |
| python3 pipeline/build_animation.py # 3. one file per motion -> ../animation/ |
| python3 pipeline/build_metadata.py # 4. measure animation/ -> ../animation.csv, ../species.csv, sidecars |
| ``` |
|
|
| The result is one flat folder, one file per motion, named `<Species>-<Action>.fbx`: |
|
|
| ``` |
| Cat-Walk.fbx Trex-Big_Roar_Step.fbx SabreToothTiger-Tired_Yawn.fbx |
| ``` |
|
|
| The species is a single alphanumeric token and the action never contains a hyphen, so |
| `name.split("-", 1)` always recovers both parts. Actions are underscore-separated capitalised |
| words with a trailing `_2` / `_3` for variants, matching the Mixamo convention. |
|
|
| Guarantees, each checked rather than assumed: exactly one animation per file, no clip repeats |
| another, every source motion is covered (one exception, `Lynx/Idle4`, ships only inside a |
| combined file), and 30 fps throughout, measured from key times. |
|
|
| Selecting and renaming only — nothing is ever re-exported. Every clip is a hardlink straight |
| into `Truebone_Z-OO/`, byte for byte, so no clip carries a rig that a round trip through an |
| editor has altered. Steps 1 and 4 regenerate `clips.csv`, `animation.csv`, `species.csv` and |
| the two JSON sidecars; apart from the sixteen repaired clips below they should match the files |
| shipped here, which is also how to verify a rebuild. Step 5, `build_prompts.py`, re-downloads |
| the captions from their source; its result already ships here as `animation_prompts.json`. |
| `scripts/README.md` documents each step. |
|
|
| **Sixteen of the 1,097 clips received a one-off binary repair** that the pipeline does not |
| re-apply: the four `Cat` clips had their missing texture embedded |
| (`probes/fbx_embed_texture.py`), and the twelve `KingCobra` clips had a duplicated co-located |
| mesh variant removed (`probes/fbx_strip_variant.py`); one of them, `KingCobra-Walk`, whose |
| source shipped no mesh at all, additionally received a sibling's mesh |
| (`probes/fbx_graft_mesh.py`) and had its material settings aligned with its siblings' |
| (`probes/fbx_align_material.py`). These edits touch textures and meshes only, never the |
| motion. All four probes are included and documented in `scripts/README.md`, each gated on a |
| byte-identical no-edit round trip and writing through a temporary file so the source keeps its |
| own bytes. |
|
|
| The GLB mirror, `animation_glb/`, is a one-to-one conversion of `animation/` — mesh, armature, |
| and the clip's single animation take, named after the action — for toolchains that read glTF |
| rather than FBX. Regenerate it from your rebuilt clips with Blender's FBX importer and glTF |
| exporter. |
|
|
| ## animation.csv |
|
|
| | column | meaning | |
| |---|---| |
| | `file` | `animation/Cat-Walk.fbx` | |
| | `species`, `action` | the two halves of the filename | |
| | `take` | the animation stack's own name, as the source spelled it | |
| | `num_takes`, `num_actions` | animation stacks in the file, and how many carry curves; `num_actions` is 1 everywhere | |
| | `num_joints` | nodes in the FBX hierarchy (see *Data notes*) | |
| | `root_joint` | the topmost joint carrying animation | |
| | `frames`, `fps`, `duration_sec` | timeline, read off the key times | |
| | `fbx_version`, `bytes` | file version and size | |
| | `num_source_files` | how many files in `Truebone_Z-OO/` this clip accounts for | |
|
|
| ## species.csv |
|
|
| Per species: `num_clips`, `num_joints`, `rig_variants`, `root_joint`, `total_frames`, |
| `total_duration_sec`, `mean_duration_sec`, `num_textures`, `source_fbx`, `source_bvh`, |
| `has_combined_all`, `has_tpose`. |
|
|
| `rig_variants` is how many distinct joint-name sets the species' clips use — 1 for 72 of them, |
| 2 for `KingCobra` and 4 for `Monkey`. |
| Counts run from 70 clips (`Trex`) to 3 (`Chicken`, `Parrot2`), median 12. |
|
|
| ## species_tpose/ |
| |
| One 1024×1024 PNG per species: a 2×2 grid of its rest pose — front and back on the top row, |
| left and right below — rendered (EEVEE) from the species' first clip in `animation/`. A visual |
| index of the 74 rigs. |
| |
| ## animation_render/ |
|
|
| A four-view render of every clip, straight from its FBX (mesh and textures included). One |
| folder per clip, named after the FBX stem: |
|
|
| ``` |
| animation_render/Cat-Walk/ |
| v000.mp4 v000.json front (azimuth -90°) |
| v001.mp4 v001.json back (azimuth +90°) |
| v002.mp4 v002.json left (azimuth 180°) |
| v003.mp4 v003.json right (azimuth 0°) |
| ``` |
|
|
| Rendered with Blender EEVEE at 512×512, 30 fps, elevation 0, and composed into one H.264 MP4 |
| per view — the transparent-film frames flattened onto a light-grey background, since H.264 |
| carries no alpha. The MP4s preview each motion directly on the Hub; the per-frame RGBA PNGs |
| behind them are not hosted (they would add over 400k files), so extract stills from the MP4s |
| (`ffmpeg -i v000.mp4 frames/%04d.png`) if you need them. |
|
|
| Rendering covers the first 200 frames of a clip (~6.7 s); 117 of the 1,097 clips are longer |
| and are truncated — `frame_start`/`frame_end` in the per-view JSON record the covered range. |
| Frame counts otherwise match `animation_frames.json` exactly. |
|
|
| Each `v00X.json` holds the camera in NeRF convention: `view`, `azimuth`/`elevation` (radians), |
| `resolution`, `camera_angle_x` (horizontal FoV, radians), the 4×4 camera-to-world |
| `transform_matrix`, the `scene_scale`/`scene_offset` that normalised the asset into frame, |
| and `frame_start`/`frame_end`/`fps`. The nine `inferred` prompts in |
| `animation_prompts.json` were written against these renders. |
|
|
| ## clips.csv |
|
|
| One row per file in `Truebone_Z-OO/`, mapping every source path onto the dataset: |
| `status` says what the file is (`linked` into `animation/`, a BVH `mirror` of a linked clip, a |
| `duplicate`, a group's `combined` ALL file, a `static` pose, or an orphan), and |
| `animation_file` points at the clip that carries its motion. Use it to trace any clip back to |
| the exact source files it came from. |
|
|
| ## animation_frames.json and animation_bones.json |
|
|
| Two flat sidecars, sorted by key: |
|
|
| ```json |
| // animation_frames.json — 1,097 keys |
| "Alligator-Big_Mouth.fbx": 136 |
| |
| // animation_bones.json — 74 keys, one per species |
| "Pigeon": ["Hips", "LeftArm", "LeftForeArm", "LeftLeg", |
| "RightArm", "RightForeArm", "RightLeg", "Spine", "Tail01"] |
| ``` |
|
|
| The skeleton is per species, so the bone list is keyed by species: the joint set its clips most |
| often carry, taken from actual files. For 72 of the 74 every clip matches it exactly; the |
| exceptions are `KingCobra` and `Monkey`, whose variants `species.csv` records as `rig_variants`. |
|
|
| ## animation_prompts.json |
| |
| One text prompt per clip — a flat map from filename to a small record, absent fields left out: |
| |
| ```json |
| "Trex-Death.fbx": { |
| "object_name": "Tyrannosaurus Rex", |
| "prompt": "A running tyrannosaurus rex loses balance and falls to the right.", |
| "prompt_source": "t2m4lvo" |
| } |
| ``` |
| |
| | field | meaning | |
| |---|---| |
| | `prompt` | what the clip shows, in one sentence. Median 12 words | |
| | `object_name` | the species as the annotator named it — `Tyrannosaurus Rex`, `Great White Shark` | |
| | `prompt_source` | `t2m4lvo` on 1,088 clips, `inferred` on 9 quiet clips captioned here instead | |
| | `alt_prompt` | on 20 clips only: the source shipped that motion twice, so it was described twice | |
|
|
| The captions come from [T2M4LVO](https://huggingface.co/datasets/1Konny/t2m4lvo-truebones-zoo), |
| the annotation set released with *How to Move Your Dragon* (ICML 2025). **T2M4LVO is |
| CC-BY-NC-4.0 — non-commercial use only, narrower than the rest of this repository.** Three |
| captions are shared by two clips each; retrieval metrics should group ground truth by caption |
| text so those pairs are not scored as misses. |
|
|
| ## Usage |
|
|
| ```python |
| import csv, collections |
| |
| clips = list(csv.DictReader(open("animation.csv"))) |
| species = list(csv.DictReader(open("species.csv"))) |
| |
| # clips of at least a second, grouped by species |
| by_species = collections.defaultdict(list) |
| for c in clips: |
| if float(c["duration_sec"]) >= 1.0: |
| by_species[c["species"]].append(c) |
| |
| # every walk cycle in the library |
| walks = [c for c in clips if c["action"].startswith("Walk")] |
| ``` |
|
|
| `scripts/probes/` bundles dependency-free FBX and BVH readers |
| (`fbx_probe.probe(path)`, `bvh_probe.probe(path)`) that return joints, keyframes, fps, |
| duration, root and joint names. |
|
|
| ## Data notes |
|
|
| - **`num_joints` counts every node in the FBX hierarchy**, not only bones — the exporter types |
| mesh and null containers as `LimbNode` too, so an FBX typically reports two to four more |
| "joints" than the matching BVH, and for a handful of rigs `root_joint` is a container |
| (`Null`, `EAL1_2`, `N_ALL`) rather than `Hips`. |
| - **Five species do not share one skeleton across their clips** — `Elephant`, `Fox`, `Monkey`, |
| `KingCobra` and `PolarBearB` vary in rest offsets along authoring-batch lines, inherited from |
| the source. Joint *names* agree everywhere; `KingCobra` additionally ships 19- and 20-joint |
| variants. A clip's rest pose is its own first frame, so these are also the five species whose |
| clips carry more than one rest pose. |
| - **Source spelling is preserved verbatim**, typos included (`Angery_Swat`, `Sqwak`, `Begg`), |
| so the mapping back to `Truebone_Z-OO/` stays exact. Joint naming is not standardised across |
| species. |
| - **Materials are 2014 Phong with no `ReflectionFactor` set**; Blender's importer defaults that |
| to `Metallic` 1.0, so clips import fully metallic — set `Metallic` to 0 after import for a |
| dielectric look. |
| - `excluded.csv` lists the one source file no importer reads |
| (`Truebone_Z-OO/Crocodile/CrocodileALL.fbx`, not a binary FBX). |
|
|
| ## Source |
|
|
| Truebones Z-OO by Truebones Motions Animation Studios, obtained from |
| <https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC>. `Terms of Use.txt` ships with the original download and |
| governs what may be done with these assets: they may not be resold or redistributed — which is |
| why no FBX, GLB or BVH is included here, and why `animation/` is rebuilt from your own |
| purchased copy. The metadata, sidecars and scripts describe and rebuild the library without |
| containing it; the renders — the per-clip multi-view videos and frames and the rest-pose |
| grids — depict Truebones assets and are included as visual reference. The captions |
| carry their own license (CC-BY-NC-4.0; see `animation_prompts.json` above). |
|
|
