I'm a blender noob I can't make then in blender. Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. User account menu. Posted by just now. Is there an alternative to mixamo for animations that let you design characters? In this Blender 2.8 Tutorial we will look at the workflow for creating and moving a 3D Character from Adobe Fuse to Mixamo to Blender 2.8. There will be 3 ex.
Mixamo, by Adobe, provides an easy way to get startedwith character animation:
- Automatic character rigging. Upload a 3D model, place a few markers onjoints, and you’ve got a rigged character. Note: Mixamo only supports humanoidcharacters.
- Library of customizable animations. Mixamo’s library contains thousands offree animations, any of which can be used with their default characters or anymodel you upload.
Mixamo exports characters and animations to COLLADA or FBX. For game engineslike Unity, those exchange formats work just fine: the engine will converteverything to an optimized runtime format when building your game. For WebGL andWebVR, developers and artists don’t have the luxury of a “build” step: modelsneed to be optimized before loading in libraries likethree.js and BabylonJS.
glTF (GL Transmission Format) offers a web-friendlyruntime format that suits this use case well. In this post, I’ll go through myworkflow using Mixamo to rig, animate, and export a character to glTF.
1. Create a rigged character
Mixamo makes this step incredibly easy. Log in, click Upload Character, andfollow the step-by-step instructions. Characters rigged outside of Mixamo areprobably not going to work with their animation library so if you want thatlevel of control, consider reading thistutorial instead.
Once you’ve found or uploaded a model, download it — with no animations selected— choosing Format = FBX, Pose = T-pose .
2. Download animations for the character
Select one animation at a time in Mixamo, and download each in FBX format. Don’tinclude the skin, because we already have that in the base character file. Thesefiles can be reused for multiple characters.
3. Import everything into Blender
NOTE: These instructions were written against Blender 2.78c. The steps,especially the settings for importing FBX files, are different in older versionsof Blender.*
We need to import all of the FBX files — our character and each animation — intoBlender. Let’s assume you have a base character and two animations:
- character.fbx
One at a time, we’ll add these to the Blender scene:
- File → Import → FBX.
- Under Main, select Manual Orientation.
- Under Armatures, select Automatic Bone Orientation.
- Select the base character model, then Import FBX.
- In the Blender scene graph, rename this object as Character, and rename itsanimation as TPose.
- Repeat for each animation file. After importing each animation file, name theanimations Run and Idle respectively.
At this point, you should see your model and some skeletons in various poses,but no animation playing yet. If something has gone wrong, reset the scene andimport each file again. Or, find more detailed instructions on this step in oneof the Youtube videos at the bottom of this post.
4. Preview the character animations
Before we export anything, let’s try previewing each animation in Blender andmake sure things look OK. Steps:
- Play animation in the Blender’s footer.
TIP: You should expect to see skeletons moving around now, but the modelitself will appear stuck in the T-pose. We’ll apply the animations to theoriginal model in the next few steps.*
- Open the Dope Sheet in a new panel.
- In the Dope Sheet panel, select Action Editor in the footer.
- After selecting the character, try playing different Actions (there will be oneAction for each animation, plus the T-Pose).
TIP: If you don’t see the option to select an animation, make sure that youhave selected the character from the scene graph, and opened the ActionEditor in the Dope Sheet. If the model isn’t animating, make sure you’veselected the character before choosing an animation.
If this all looks right, switch back to the T-Pose animation and save thescene to a new .blend file.
5. Export to glTF
Time to export our model! Make sure you’ve saved your Blender scene by thispoint.
- Delete the armatures from the animations, leaving only the base character andits armature.
- Install the Khronos Group glTF exporteror Kupoman glTF exporter. Bothexporters cannot be enabled at the same time.
NOTE: When this post was initially published, only the Kupoman exportersupported multiple animations. Now both exporters should work.
- If using the Khronos Group exporter — Ensure the actions you want to exportare either active, stashed, or 'pushed down' into NLA tracks.
- File → Export → glTF
- If using the Kupoman exporter — In the Animations section, ensure that All Eligible objects and armaturesare exported. This ensures we get all of the available animations, not just the T-Pose.
The export will create multiple files: a .gltf, a .bin, and perhaps sometextures. Test the model on the drag-and-drop three.js glTFviewer, by dragging all of those filesinto the window together. In the Animations tab, select animations one at atime and ensure that they play as expected.
If something is wrong at this point, test the model out in the BabylonJSviewer. Model working in Babylon but notthree.js? File an issue on myviewer. Model notworking anywhere? Double-check that everything looks OK in Blender, and if so,file an issue on the Blenderexporter.
If you got this far and everything looks OK in the viewer, you’ve got ananimated glTF 2.0 character ready for use in A-Frame, three.js, BabylonJS, andmore. Nice work!
CREDITS: Thanks to Daniel Stokes forimplementing support for multiple actions in the glTF exporter, and to TobyTremayne for testing and feedback onearlier drafts of this post.
Appendix: Loading animated characters in A-Frame
A future post will describe how to transition between animations in A-Frame, andassociate each animation with character states. For the quick/easy version inthe meantime, use the animation-mixer component from A-FrameExtras:
The animation-mixer component has a few simple options that allow you tocrossfade between animations and control looping. For full control, check outthe three.js animationsystem, whichanimation-mixer uses under the hood.
Mixamo Blender Rig
Resources
Maximo Blender
For more information, you may want to go through these Youtube tutorials onBlender and Mixamo:
Mixamo Blender Converter
- Using Mixamo with Blender. Thefirst ½ of the video is relevant — disregard everything after the author beginscreating a single combined animation track. The video advises using anexperimental Apply Transform option, which DID NOT work for me in recentversions of Blender.
- A-Frame / Mixamo walkthrough.This video describes a somewhat different workflow, and targets the three.jsJSON format, but may also be helpful.