Hi, I’m would really really, really, appreciate if someone would point me to a solution how to use mixamo animations with Rigify add-on.
Mixamo to Rigify
I want to stress it: how to use Mixamo animations with Rigify, not only blender.
There are no shortage of videos to show how to just download animation from mixamo and use their rig, but what to do if I wanted to use it with rigify add-on? Latest tutorials I can find are years old, and stuff does not really work.
Should I contact to Rigify developers? How would one do that?
It can be done once you have applied the rigify skeleton to your mesh…and then import the Miximo animation as an FBX…then is when it gets convoluted…you would have to go in and rename everything in the bone groups of the animation to fit Rigify and apply them to the mesh groups.
I would highly recommend that if you have your character rigged, just import animation as BVH. There are thousands of BVH animations out there and there is nothing really that miximo has that can’t be replaced with a BVH. BVH archive
Thanks, I have tried most of that library btw. They barely work, and have way too many keyframes, and if I remember correctly then it required using their skeleton as well.
I just tried an old file I have with rigify mesh etc. (imported from an old 2.79B file) I exported the Miximo animation as FBX and without skin… but imported adds an armature to the file and I parented it to the Body …the anim works and file still has rigify controls…it is just not driving the rigyfy rig…
Convoluted I know and I am going to guess thats NOT what you were looking for…but I will keep seeing what I can do…
I never used a special armature for BVH…just imported always works but always need some tweaking and removal of key frames.
I don’t have answer, but I was experimenting with this stuff, this is what i got:
You need to retarget to the rigify rig but it’s problematic. makewalk has some support for the legacy rigify, quite good, but it’s old and not getting updated.
Autorig pro paid addon has a quite good retargeter which works on it’s own rig, migth work on rigify as well.
What i did ano is to use the unrigify script
it basically strips the rigify rig from it’s control bones and bakes any animations you made to just a new deform rig. then you can use again autorig pro or the built in mocap tools addon to retarget mixamo to the new rig. You won’t have the control rig anymore, but your own animations made with rigify will be compatible with retargeted mixamo’s. If you need modifications to the mixamo animation you can use the graph editor.
I did this today manually. The good thing about it is that if you keep the file, you can use it to store every mixamo animation you want, and it will work with any humanoid rigify rig.
Just import the skeleton, and start snapping a rigify metarig to the imported skeleton. Generate the rig. CHECK THE RIG CAREFULLY to ensure everything is lined up and oriented correctly. Start constraining the controls (yes, this means you cannot control the rigify rig any longer, bare with me) of the rig to the Mixamo rig. (Works with any other rig for that matter).
Experiment with the constraints to see what does what. Mainly you’ll be needing ‘copy’ transform constraints, mostly ‘rotation’. Sometimes, you may want a scale constraint, even an IK constraint sometimes.
Once you’re happy with how much your rigify rig follows the mixamo one, start importing your fbx’s animations, and simply copy the action accross to the rigify rig. Bake the animation on the rig with visual transforms ticked. It will be all weird looking unless you automatically disable modifiers, but your actions should basically work if you set the constraints up right. This file can now be used to store hundreds of mixamo animations, and you can import the actions onto any compatible rigify rig, which of course will not need constraints for the baked animation to work, and be easily editable.
The main point is that rigify exports badly to unreal… however it seems to work for some ppl… and maybe it will work without issue…
This script can work two ways: it can bake any animation made with rigify controls to a new rig which exports well, but it can also constrain the new skeleton to the original bones, so any animation you make with rigify can also be baked to the new rig. And the newly generated rig has better hiearchy than the deform bones of the rigify rig.
It’s very simple, once you’ve baked the contrained actions in one file, you simply append those actions over to the over file where you DO have control. The idea of baking to the controls is so that you CAN further edit those actions. The original Blend file then becomes a miximo animation library for rigify.
I’ve used this in heavy CG production and can confirm that it is a big time saver once you’ve set it up right.
Maybe I should make a tutorial? seems like it might be popular…
I’ve successfully used this cool script (https://github.com/Mwni/blender-animation-retargeting) to retarget a MakeHuman rig to my homemade armature. As far as I know (sadly… not much at this moment), it should work with every rig.
PS if you make a setup of that, how can you customize it to your own model. DOesnt you model need to be exact same dimensions, with limbs, legs arms etc etc all at the same distance according to the rig?
I’m currently playing around with mixamo, and ideally I’d like to create some bespoke animations using a rigify rig to combine with mixamo animations. I exported my fbx with the default rigify armature and imported it into mixamo, and successfully re-imported the fbx with animation. Obviously I could animate the bones as they are, but it would be nice to have the rigify controls, but also be able to combine actions strips in the NLA editor.
I’d try to use already existing solutions like MH’s makewalk to retarget a bvh file to the rig. To get such a bvh from a mixamo’s rig, I’d just rename its bones to control bones’ names of my rig, and then just export it to a bvh file. And makewalk uses user bone name mapping table, so it’s possible to use it instead of renaming the mixamo’s bones.