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Mixamo: Character Animation for Blender

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Mixamo.com supplies motion-capture data, What makes it unique is their workflow: you upload your own (rigged) character, map the rig to theirs and choose an animation. Using their on-line editor, you can then tweak the animation before you download and use it. As of today, Mixamo actively supports Blender.

I'm looking for an experienced character animator to test-drive and review this service for us. Mixamo will provide download credits for your use. If you're interested, please tell me why we need to choose you!

From their press-release:

Mixamo Unveils Unparalleled Blender Character Animation Support

New Mixamo-Blender Workflow Integration Can Save Blender Artists Up To 75% In Production Time

SAN FRANCISCO – August 24, 2010 – Mixamo Inc. today announced new support for Blender users looking to create high-quality character animations for their 3D projects. The new end-to- end workflow provides the Blender community with a seamless process to add animations to characters created in Blender or from Mixamo’s Character Creator Suite directly. The entire collection of Mixamo motions is now accessible to Blender users, which can be found at www.mixamo.com.

Luc Barthelet, CEO of virtual world Tirnua, has already had great success using the Mixamo-Blender workflow. “We were able to integrate Mixamo with our Blender production pipeline quite easily; it has enabled us to add realistic motions to Tirnua five-times faster than if we were to animate by hand,“ says Barthelet. “Having access to the entire Mixamo collection of animations will be a huge benefit to us as we continue to build up the rich simulation world of Tirnua.”

“Mixamo is the first service to offer Blender users easy access to high-quality animations that can be customized and retargeted to any character in real-time,” says Mixamo Co-founder and CTO, Stefano Corazza. “With Mixamo, the Blender community can easily apply animations to any character in their 3D scenes by following a simple end-to-end workflow process that we developed.”

Blender users can bring Mixamo animations into their projects in several ways depending on their needs, using Collada or BVH format based workflows. Whether importing their Blender- created character models into Mixamo or creating rigged models on Mixamo with the Character Creator Suite, Blender users can customize their animations on characters of their choosing and then easily bring them back into their Blender project. Because Mixamo’s sophisticated service simplifies the character animation process through automated, real-time controls, Blender users save up to 75% in production times and 80% in costs.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

9 Comments

  1. Ive used Mixamo in my blender pipeline and it worked great. Their support is awesome and I was able to import everything back into blender with out knowing how to animate. Highly recommended.

  2. I am highly interested in this for the academic use Bart.

    The link to submit interest leads to a "Submit News" page.

    Do you want us to send you an email that way?

    Claas

  3. hm, interesting idea, and interesting too your support to Blender... but i suggest you to show better/other uses of mixamo than the ones shown here: http://www.mixamo.com/c/showcase

    I understand that from the commercial point of view, these videos are so clear in how characters move and so. But a little too obvious for my taste and commercial sense. If you claim that with you service you can save 70% of the time... In what have invested the time the guys/girls behind the two first animations on the showcase? lighting, acting, color, storytelling everything else is bad/could be severely improved except what tells about your service. And provided that the context matters, no need to say more. The third example seems a lot more serious thing.. but your server is or seems (perhaps this review on BlenderNation has something to do with it ;-) ) so slow, and I get tired of waiting.

    So, show how amazing could be animations with the time saving that your product is delivering. Not just a bunch of zombies doing the zombie. Sure some well talented Blender artists (not me, at least for the moment ;)) can help on this. Anyway, good luck with your business!

    Regards,
    Raimon

  4. @claas: there's an option 'send a message to the team', which you correctly used, but I can see how that can be confusing. I'll put that on the todo list!

  5. It's a wonderful and welcome move. But, please, make the import and export scripts more dependable.

    In Blender 2.53 Beta, the collado format mesh data was read correctly but the action data wasn't. And its export was not recognized as valid by your site "http://www.mixamo.com/".

    In Blender 2.49b, the mesh data wasn't read correctly. Though, its *.fbx export file was recognized as valid in your site, evidently it wasn't read correctly either.

    I'll look forward to stable scripts.

  6. Does anyone know of any way to get JUST ONE character rigged for free through Mixamo?
    I relaize I may be asking a lot. But It's my first Biped model and I can't afford the $90 charge just to get it simply Rigged. I've tried rigging it in Blender myself but I keep running into HUGE issues. Mixamo rigged the basics quickly and perfectly. Apart form the characters eyes dissapearing and there being a off Seprate deform near the feet. It's MUCH better then what I can currently do. I just can't afford it.
    I only need this one character rigged. I plan to use it to showcase my Tshirt designs.
    Also, how do I get the textures & Materials to carry over to Mixamo? My uploaded model lost ALL ot's Materials and Textures. :(

    Thanks in Advance

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