BOOTCAMP: MIXAMO

Discover this animation service

T he dream of many 3D artists is to be well versed in all aspects of the 3D process, without having to spend many hours, days and weeks learning the craft and artistry behind a skill, such as character animation. Unfortunately, we haven’t developed the brain download technology so memorably shown off in The Matrix, but thankfully artists instead have a wide array of tools available to them, helping to deliver products in minutes that would otherwise take many months of learning.

A great example of this is the Mixamo service (www.mixamo.

com), which is now part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of tools.

Mixamo had been around as a full paid-for service before its Adobe acquisition, and it’s now free with an Adobe ID (a Creative Cloud subscription is not required). This has meant that while some of the features have been paired down, Mixamo is much easier for new artists.

Work with human bipedal characters, either chosen in Mixamo or uploaded by the user, and once the simple auto-rigging procedure has been applied to the model, a huge variety of animations are available to choose from. These can then be downloaded in familiar formats such as FBX. Mixamo’s underlying technology has dealt with features like weighting, which can be a tedious and error-prone task for new and experienced CG artists.

When loaded into a 3D application, Mixamo characters work just the same as any other imported character model, in that it has a mesh and a full parented rig that moves the model. This standard setup means that integrating a Mixamo figure into a scene, or blending animations for the more advanced artists, will be a straightforward process.

With the addition of Adobe’s new character creator ‘Fuse’ software, Mixamo has the ability to help many more artists with their character creation needs. Let’s take a look at some of the basics.