Convert BVH to USDZ
Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .bvh file in and take the .usdz away.
Drop your BVH file here
.bvh in, .usdz out
Choose filesNothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit
How to convert BVH to USDZ
- 01
Add your .bvh file
Drag your Biovision Hierarchy file onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Nothing is uploaded: it is read where it already sits.
- 02
Check the preview
The model is parsed on your machine and drawn in the viewport, so a wrong axis or a missing texture shows up before you commit rather than downstream.
- 03
Save the .usdz file
Press convert. The Universal Scene Description (zipped) file is written in the tab and lands in your downloads folder. No link, no expiry, no account.
What carries over, and what does not
A format conversion is a translation, and translations lose things. Here is what actually happens when a BVH file becomes a USDZ file.
| Data | BVH | USDZ | Survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geometry | No | Yes | n/a |
| Materials & colour | No | Yes | n/a |
| Texture maps | No | Yes | n/a |
| Animation & rigs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 2 of the five categories above are supported by both formats, so most of what is in your BVH file has somewhere to go in the USDZ file.
About Biovision Hierarchy
A BVH file is pure movement: a joint hierarchy with offsets, followed by one line of channel values per frame. There is no geometry in it whatsoever, which is the point: it is how motion capture moves between systems, and how libraries like CMU’s mocap database are distributed. Converting one gives you the animated skeleton, so pick a destination that stores animation.
Commonly seen in: CMU Motion Capture Database, MotionBuilder, Blender, Poser. More on the BVH format page.
About Universal Scene Description (zipped)
USDZ is Pixar’s Universal Scene Description packed into an uncompressed zip archive, and it is the format Apple’s AR Quick Look expects. Send someone a .usdz link and iOS will drop the model into their living room straight from Safari or Messages, with no app to install. Under the hood USD is a full scene-composition system built for feature-film pipelines, of which USDZ exposes a deliberately narrow, single-asset slice.
Commonly seen in: AR Quick Look on iOS, Reality Composer, Safari, Shopify AR, Adobe Aero. More on the USDZ format page.
How the conversion works
When you drop a file in, the bytes are handed to a parser compiled to run in your browser. The BVH data is decoded into an in-memory scene graph of meshes, materials and transforms, which is what the preview is drawing. Pressing convert walks that scene graph back out through a USDZ writer and hands you the resulting bytes as a download.
The whole round trip is local. The page itself is static: it is delivered once and then does its work offline. That is why the privacy claim is checkable rather than a promise.
BVH to USDZ: common questions
Is my BVH file uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by code running inside this browser tab and never crosses the network. You can prove it by disconnecting from the internet before you convert, the page keeps working, or by watching the Network tab in your browser's developer tools while you drop a file in.
How large a BVH file can I convert?
There is no server-side limit because there is no server. The practical ceiling is your own machine's memory: a browser tab can usually handle models up to a few hundred megabytes. Very dense scans or scenes with millions of triangles will take a few seconds and a lot of RAM.
Why does my converted USDZ file look untextured?
USDZ does support textures, but the images have to be available to embed. If your BVH file references texture images that live next to it on disk, drag those images into the drop zone along with the model and they will be picked up.
Does it cost anything?
No. There is no fee, no account, no watermark and no per-file limit. Since the conversion runs on your hardware rather than ours, serving this page costs about as much as serving a blog post.
Does it work on a Mac, on Windows or on a phone?
All of them. There is nothing to install: any browser with WebGL 2 will do, which covers current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, and Safari and Chrome on mobile. A phone has less memory than a laptop, so a very heavy scene may be the one thing it cannot finish.
Related conversions
Other things to do with the same file.
From BVH:
Other ways to get to USDZ:
Or do something else with it: