With full-body motion capture, carefully thought-out sensor placement and skeletal design are essential. For information on working with full-body motion capture data in Maya, see Create full body motion capture.
You can create a character based on the actor’s body. If you are using a magnetic system, you can place sensors on opposite sides of each of the actor’s joints and record the sensor’s location at each placement. You can construct a skeleton that has joints located between opposing sensor positions. If magnetic noise is not a problem, this will produce an accurate representation of the actor’s skeleton.
If this is not possible or the character is dissimilar to the actor, create a skeleton based on the actor and solve for that skeleton. You can use constraints, expressions, and connections to map joint rotations and the root position from the actor skeleton to a character.
It is worth taking extra time to ensure that your data is as clean as possible. For optical systems, this mean rigorous calibration of both the space and the actor. For magnetic systems, the freer the space of magnetic noise, the better the result.