BVH Motion Capture Format

by Ben Kenwright

The BVH Format is a text format, so this makes it a bit easier to work with, as you can open it up in notepad and get an idea of what's in it.  The file format also stores the hierarchy information of the skeleton that was used for the motion capture files, which can be very useful especially if your applying your motion capture data to a different skeleton.

WARNING - Degrees or Radians

Just a note to the wiser!  When I write my first BVH parser, I spent a long time wondering why non of my motions would work.  Everything seemed right, but would just fly around when I played it.  I thought my offsets where wrong, or my rotation orders where incorrect.  Until I eventually realised I'd made the assumption that the rotational angles would be stored in radians!  What a silly assumption.  So make sure you convert your angles to radians before you use them.