What's wrong with BVH?

Nodtveidt · Post by **Nodtveidt** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 4:48 am

I've seen several instances where forum-dwellers have complained that BVH is an "inferior" format. My question is...why? I'm not for or against using it, I just want to know details on why this isn't a favored format...

omaremad · Post by **omaremad** » Mon Jan 01, 2007 5:20 pm

Isnt bvh just for animation? wll its mostly captured stuff from real life which isnt good for games unless you hired a studio just for capturing you own game moves.

Nodtveidt · Post by **Nodtveidt** » Mon Jan 01, 2007 8:28 pm

Yeah, it's used for model animation. I use the format with a couple of programs. But I'm just wondering why many people consider it to be so "bad", and if there are better alternatives...the first question being more important, though.

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Mon Jan 01, 2007 10:42 pm

Nodtveidt wrote:Yeah, it's used for model animation. I use the format with a couple of programs. But I'm just wondering why many people consider it to be so "bad", and if there are better alternatives...the first question being more important, though.

I wrote the BVH importer for MilkShape so I know a bit about the format. The main issue is that the joint rotations are in Euler angles and can be in any order (the order of rotations is important for Euler angles). This is no problem if the app loading the file supports arbitary rotation order, takes matrices (so you can concatenate the rotations in the correct order and pass the matrix to the app) or takes quaternions. An app like MilkShape only takes Euler angles and has a fixed XYZ rotation order which is why some bvh files don't load correctly.