Convert BVH to XYZ
Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .bvh file in and take the .xyz away.
Drop your BVH file here
.bvh in, .xyz out
Choose filesNothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit
How to convert BVH to XYZ
- 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 .xyz file
Press convert. The XYZ Point Cloud 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 an XYZ file.
| Data | BVH | XYZ | Survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geometry | No | No | n/a |
| Materials & colour | No | No | n/a |
| Texture maps | No | No | n/a |
| Animation & rigs | Yes | No | Dropped |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes | No | Dropped |
Expect to lose
- XYZ stores no animation, so rigs and takes in your BVH file are not carried over.
- The scene hierarchy is flattened: separate objects in the BVH file are merged into one mesh.
None of this is a defect in the conversion; it is what XYZ is specified to hold. If you need the missing data, convert to GLB instead, which carries geometry, PBR materials, textures and animation in a single file.
What our XYZ writer puts in the file
The vertices of the model, one point a line, with colour. Triangles are not written.
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 XYZ Point Cloud
An XYZ file is a text file with one point per line: three coordinates, optionally followed by three colour values. That is the entire specification. Its simplicity makes it the universal fallback for surveying data, scientific point sets and anything exported from a spreadsheet or a script.
Commonly seen in: CloudCompare, MeshLab, surveying tools, scientific data exports. More on the XYZ 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 XYZ 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 XYZ: 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 XYZ file look untextured?
XYZ stores geometry only; it has no way to record materials or texture maps. If you need the surfacing to survive, convert to GLB or glTF instead.
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 XYZ:
Or do something else with it: