History and Development
BVH file format's history and development span back to the 1990s, and it was originally developed as a proprietary file format for BioVision's motion capture systems, but later it was adopted by other motion capture systems, such as Vicon and OptiTrack. In the early days, BVH files were created for specific models and needed to be reworked for different models. However, as the use of BVH grew, more standardized models were created and used across different systems.
The development of BVH file format was a significant milestone in 3D animation and motion capture. Prior to BVH, motion data was recorded with pen and paper or entered manually into a computer. BVH allowed for the automatic capture and recording of motion data, making it easier and more efficient to create realistic animations.
Today, BVH remains a widely used file format for motion capture data and is supported by many animation software packages, such as Autodesk's Maya and Blender. It has become an essential tool in the animation industry, particularly for creating realistic and lifelike animations for movies and video games.
A scene graph is a general data structure commonly used by vector-based graphics editing applications and modern computer games, which arranges the logical and often spatial representation of a graphical scene. It is a collection of nodes in a graph or tree structure. A tree node may have many children but only a single parent, with the effect of a parent applied to all its child nodes; an operation performed on a group automatically propagates its effect to all of its members. In many programs, associating a geometrical transformation matrix at each group level and concatenating such matrices together is an efficient and natural way to process such operations. A common feature, for instance, is the ability to group related shapes and objects into a compound object that can then be manipulated as easily as a single object.
Fast Light Toolkit is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made to accommodate 3D graphics programming, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming.
The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a CAD data exchange data schema intended for description of architectural, building and construction industry data.
1–inch Type C is a professional reel-to-reel analog recording helical scan videotape format co-developed and introduced by Ampex and Sony in 1976. It became the replacement in the professional video and broadcast television industries for the then-incumbent 2–inch quadruplex videotape open-reel format. Additionally, it replaced the unsuccessful type A format, also invented by Ampex, and, primarily in mainland Europe, it supplemented the type B format, invented by the Fernseh division of Bosch, but it was replaced by type C format also there.
In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files.
QuickTime File Format (QTFF) is a computer file format used natively by the QuickTime framework.
JT is an openly-published ISO-standardized 3D CAD data exchange format used for product visualization, collaboration, digital mockups, and other purposes. It was developed by Siemens.
A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed, and contain large amounts of potentially redundant data. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter, in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.
A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, which form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes. These nodes are then grouped as small sets and enclosed within larger bounding volumes. These, in turn, are also grouped and enclosed within other larger bounding volumes in a recursive fashion, eventually resulting in a tree structure with a single bounding volume at the top of the tree. Bounding volume hierarchies are used to support several operations on sets of geometric objects efficiently, such as in collision detection and ray tracing.
BVH is a three letter acronym that can stand for:
Avimator is a basic BVH editor, originally written for use with Second Life, as a simple inexpensive alternative to commercial 3D rendering and animation software, such as Poser and Maya. It is open source software, and is based on the FLTK toolkit.
Seamless3d is an open-source 3D modeling software available under the MIT license.
Messiah is a 3D animation and rendering application developed by pmG Worldwide. It runs on the Win32 and Win64 platforms. It is marketed to run on Mac OS X and Linux via Wine. Messiah's fourth version, messiah:studio was released April 2009 and version 5.5b as messiah:animate was released November 2006. messiahStudio6 was released in April 2013. Messiah seems no longer maintained since 2013 (abandoned).
FBX (Filmbox) is a proprietary file format developed by Kaydara and owned by Autodesk since 2006. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications. FBX is also part of Autodesk Gameware, a series of video game middleware.
The Linear Tape File System (LTFS) is a file system that allows files stored on magnetic tape to be accessed in a similar fashion to those on disk or removable flash drives. It requires both a specific format of data on the tape media and software to provide a file system interface to the data.
iClone is a real-time 3D animation and rendering software program. Real-time playback is enabled by using a 3D videogame engine for instant on-screen rendering.
OpenQwaq is open source computer software for immersive collaboration, which enables organizations to implement online 3D virtual world workspaces for their specific needs. OpenQwaq is based on the Teleplace technology, a conferencing platform that has been in the market since 2007, with the name Qwaq Forums until 2009.
Motion JPEG 2000 is a file format for motion sequences of JPEG 2000 images and associated audio, based on the MP4 and QuickTime format. Filename extensions for Motion JPEG 2000 video files are .mj2 and .mjp2, as defined in RFC 3745.
Noesis is software for viewing, converting, and reverse engineering data. Common data types supported by the software include images, 3D models, medical imaging (DICOM), and animation.
