Play BVH files in your browser
The motion capture file of animation tools and mocap suits. Open a BVH right here, watch its skeleton move and keep it as GLB. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your take opens in 3D, its skeleton's bones moving with their joints, every joint beside it and the player under it.
- Turn, zoom and move it • Double click to center on a point
- Every joint in a list • Hide one or see it alone
- Play, pause and scrub the take • Slow it down or speed it up
- Export • PNG, GLB, USDZ, STL and OBJ
About BVH
Biovision, a motion capture studio, made BVH in the 1990s to hand its takes to animators. Blender, 3ds Max, MotionBuilder and Daz Studio read it, motion capture suits record into it, and libraries of takes share it.
A BVH is text in two parts. HIERARCHY sets up the skeleton, each joint with its offset from its parent and the channels it moves by, its turns in a given order and a position for the root. MOTION then gives the frame count, the time of a frame and a line of every channel's values for each frame.
Filepeek builds bones between the joints, the left side blue and the right side coral, shows the first frame and plays the take in the animation player, with the joints in a list beside it. Export saves it as GLB with its animation, or as a picture.
Biovision Hierarchy
.bvh
Format
- MIME type
- application/x-bvh
- Made by
- Biovision
Inside the file
- Holds
- A skeleton and its motion
- Motion
- A line of values a frame
- Units
- None stated, mostly centimeters
- Used by
- Blender, MotionBuilder and mocap suits
Opens in every browser
Filepeek plays BVH in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. No browser opens it by itself.
- YouChromeOpens through Filepeek
- YouEdgeOpens through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxOpens through Filepeek
- YouSafariOpens through Filepeek
Apps that open BVH
- WindowsBlender imports it • MotionBuilder and 3ds Max too
- MacBlender imports it, as on Windows
- iPhone and iPadNo app opens it
- AndroidNo app opens it
Questions
Why does my skeleton look tiny or huge?
A BVH doesn't say its unit. Filepeek reads it as centimeters, as most tools write it, so a take in inches or meters looks bigger or smaller, while its motion stays the same.
Why do I see bones and no body?
A BVH holds only a skeleton and how it moves. The body it drives lives in your 3D app, which binds the two together.
Why do the arms or legs twist the wrong way?
Each joint turns by its channels in the order the file lists them. A tool that writes one order and reads another twists the limbs. Filepeek follows the order in the file, as Blender does.
How do I turn BVH into GLB?
Open it, choose Export, then Save as GLB. The take comes along as its animation.