Pivot Files (.pvt)¶
A .pvt is a rest skeleton. It answers one question — what shape is this rig when nothing is animated? — and nothing else.
| Holds | Doesn't hold |
|---|---|
| Every item's name | Any animation |
| Its parent | Any frame range |
| Its pivot (rest position) | Any curve or tangent |
| Its rest rotation | |
| Its rig tag | |
| The cameras and their lens settings |
Use it for rig setup, for rebuilding a skeleton you lost, and for handing someone a rig without handing them a shot.
Most of the time you want .anm instead
A .anm carries all of the above and the animation, so it can do everything a .pvt does. Reach for .pvt deliberately, when you specifically want the skeleton alone. See Animation Files (.anm).
Exporting¶
- Select the pegs / bones / joints in your scene.
- Pivot Files (.pvt) → Export, then press + to scan them in.
- Check the Rig column — see Rigs & Multi-Rig.
- Set Scale if you need it (see below).
- Save As…, then Export Pivots.
The export list has no checkboxes: whatever is in the list is what gets written. The list, the Rig column, and the grouping behave identically to the .anm export page — a scene groups into rigs the same way whichever format it leaves as.
The Scale option¶
Scale multiplies every pivot on the way out, and the reader divides it back out on the way in. Its purpose is rigs authored at a different working size — a rig built ten times too large, say, that you want to arrive at a sane size.
Leave it at 1.000 unless you know you need it. It is recorded in the file, so a .pvt written with a scale of 10 and read back is lossless.
Note this is not the unit conversion between applications. Metres ↔ centimetres is handled automatically and separately; see Coordinate Systems.
Pivot space (Blender only)¶
Blender's export panel adds a Pivot Space choice:
| Option | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Local (relative to parent) | Each bone's position relative to its parent bone. The default, and what you want |
| Armature Space | Absolute position in armature space |
Harmony and Maya always write local. Unless you have a specific reason, leave Blender on Local too, so the file means the same thing whoever wrote it.
Importing¶
Browse… to the file. The summary line tells you what's inside — the rig name, how many items, the pivot space, the scale factor, and how many rigs it contains:
spaceship · 3 joints · space local · 2 rigs
The list shows each item with its pivot, indented into the hierarchy the file describes. There's no Parent column, because the indentation is the parenting that's about to be built.
Then:
- Build Skeleton creates the whole hierarchy — joints in Maya, bones in Blender, pegs in Harmony — at the rest pose the file describes.
- Create Cameras builds the cameras the file carries, attached to their items. It only lights up if there are any.
A .pvt import doesn't mark rows amber
Unlike the .anm import list, a .pvt preview never paints rows amber. It isn't matching against your scene — it's showing you a skeleton it's about to build from scratch. See The Match Tree.
What Build Skeleton actually makes¶
Joints, created with a clean orient: rotate order XYZ, zero joint orient, zero rotate axis. Everything lives in .rotate, so the skeleton behaves predictably and animation applied later lands where you expect.
With more than one rig in the file, each rig gets its own empty group and its roots parent under it.
One armature per rig tag. Bones are created with an identity rest, pointing +Y, so a pose bone's local transform is exactly its parent-relative transform.
A single-rig file keeps the file's own base name.
Pegs inside a wrapper group, with the pivots written into each peg's pivot attributes, wired parent-to-child and fed into a composite. The whole build is one undo step.
When a .pvt is the right answer¶
Handing off a rig. Someone needs the skeleton to work against; they don't need — or shouldn't have — your shot.
Recovery. A rig got mangled or deleted. If you exported a .pvt when it was healthy, Build Skeleton puts it back.
Setting up before animating. Build the skeleton once from a .pvt, then apply many different .anm shots onto it with Apply, without rebuilding each time.
Anything else. Use .anm.