I have come to the conclusion that building a library of clips from imported animated skeletons in the bvh format and then applying those clips to the skeletons of my characters is the way I want to animate in Maya. Too bad I can't get it to work. Here's what I've been doing:
1) I create a character set for the source skeleton (imported bvh file) and the target skeleton; both are in the same initial pose and all the bones and joints have the same names
2) I character map the two skeletons using heirarchy
3) I create a clip from the animation of the source skeleton
4) I copy this clip in the trax editor and try to apply it to the target skeleton
What I get is not pleasing: the target skeleton moves up and down in tandem with the source skeleton, but none of its joints are animated. It's like the overall transform of the skeleton as a whole is all that is being changed, or possibly only the hip joint is receiving transformations from the source skeleton. I don't know. Anyone know how to get this to work?