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 wrote my first BVH parser, I spent a long time wondering why non of my motions would work. Everything seemed right, but the animations would just fly around when I played them. 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.
Below shows the bvh loader/viewer for a test model - loads .bvh file and renders the frames (walk.bvh).
• Looking at the BVH Format Internals
• Source Code/Demo Notebook BVH Reader/Viewer
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Online Demo BVH Files/Examples (LINK)
Real-time test version written in Javascript which runs in the browser. So you can actively load and view 3D .bvh skeletal animation files (html file(Link))
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