Biovision Hierarchy .bvh
Motion capture: a skeleton and its motion, with no mesh at all.
What a .bvh file holds
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.
| Data | Stored in BVH |
|---|---|
| Geometry | No |
| Materials and colour | No |
| Texture maps | No |
| Animation and rigs | Yes |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded Boxing_Toes.bvh from Assimp test models through the viewer on this site: 140 triangles across 1 meshes and 1 materials, in 2.8 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert BVH to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with a .bvh file
Questions about BVH
How do I open a .bvh file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is BVH a good format to archive in?
BVH stores animation and rigs, scene hierarchy. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.
Does converting BVH lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.