merging two armatures from Mixamo in Blender

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hi there,

I’d like to have two animations from Mixamo merger in such manner that the upper part of the body (spine&arms) takes animation from A (for instance, be it wave), and the lower (legs) takes animation from B (for instance, walking).

I was thinking about:

  1. removing all keyframes for upper part bones from B, and

  2. removing all keyframes for lower part from A.

That cannot work as I will still have two models doing things at the same time.

Then, I considered removing also parts of the model from the animation (upper body from B and lower from A) but then if there is even a small difference in the location of the lower and upper part then the models will split and this won’t look too good.

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Therefore, I am now thinking about unparenting certain parts of armature from A and B (lower and upper body, respectively) and then merging two models while creating a parent relationship between joints. I cannot, however, remove any parent-child relationship in either of the models (the menu appears but no action is done).

Can you please suggest a way to do it or link a relevant tutorial? All tuts relating to merging animations from Mixamo in Blender relates to merging two parts of time of two clips but not the parts of the character.

TIA!

#2

You have two armatures, with two different animations, right?

Select all lower body bones in one armature (we’ll call this armature “top”.) Delete all keyframes for those bones, then reset rot/loc/scale at frame 1 and keyframe.

Select the same bones in the other armature. Select all keyframes for these bones in a graph editor view and ctrl-c copy.

Select “top” again. Make sure you’re at frame 1. Keep the same selected bones. In graph editor, ctrl-v paste.

Even easier with NLA techniques, but that’s only after you get over the NLA hump (it’s a bit of trouble to get used to NLA.)

#3

Great caveat… for a great explanation.

Thanks