02 - Animate Your Characters Mixamo - SCAI009

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Anybody who has an Adobe license also has access to something called Mixamo, available at mixamo.com. And this is, in essence, a library of pretty advanced animations, I think many of them motion capture based, that you can use in your projects, both film or even games, which I think a lot of people use this platform for. And the cool thing about Mixamo is it not only gives you a bunch of animations, but also actually takes the task of rigging over for you. So you don't actually have to use all of these other tools we're showing you, unless you want to get really professional. If you go to mixamo.com and take a look at these animations and think, hey, these should actually be enough for my project, it's perfectly fine to stick with these and just combine them in Blender for your final product. Well, once you've logged in on mixamo.com, you'll see two major tabs here. First is animations, with a bunch of funny little GIFs here that you can click on. And once you do, you can see them on this default character. Here's a praying, for example. And over here, you'll have some settings. So praying towards will actually adjust the pose of this. And overdrive will exaggerate the motion. You'll see it's kind of vibrating a little bit now. You can also increase the character arm space. Same with these other animations. So in the case of silly dancing, the settings will change a little bit. For example, you'll have an energy level now, which you can really turn up to get the exaggeration done, or have someone barely motivated to dance. You can also search here. So there's a bunch of different genres you can sort by. Let's do superhero, which has some fun animations like swinging, for example. And with these tools down here, you can move around the scene and get a better view of what the character is up to. So in this case, it actually lands up here on a ledge, for example. The other tab on Mixamo is something called characters. Now, of course, we have our own AI created characters, so we won't be needing this. But I just thought I'd show you this to give you an option for other projects. Funnily enough, they actually have this little mocap man as well, which I find pretty funny and kind of meta. But since we do have a character, how do we actually bring them into this? Well, the first step is actually going back to Blender and preparing our 3D model for use in Mixamo. So let's do that real quick. We're going to prepare our character in this Blender file. So this is my personal Blender startup file, which has a bunch of the settings that I find easiest to use. So I recommend starting with this one, as opposed to the default Blender startup file. But more on that in the previous lessons, of course. So first thing we're going to do to prep this character for Mixamo is import it, of course. And in my case, the character is currently in FBX. So we're going to import Mira here. And this is what she looks like in Material Preview. So you can see all the textures and everything. Now, unfortunately, Mixamo is a little bit old, and it's not one of the products Adobe takes a lot of care of. So it's really, really hard to import characters into Mixamo with textures. And we're just plain not going to do that. Because we can, of course, work on our animations or choose animations without seeing every single detail of this Mira character. So how do we remove these textures so we can actually work with it in Mixamo? Well, we select the character, go into Shading. And this is roughly what your shader could look like. Now, if it doesn't, because you used a different AI generator or a different process, absolutely do not worry. Because all we need to do is remove the normal map node if there is one and disconnect the base color from the texture. Now, this is what it might look like. It is possible, though, that instead of being white, it's black. We do not want that because it will be really hard to judge the motion of the character in Mixamo if everything is black like this. So do make sure your base color is set to white. And that's it. That's all we need to do. Now we can export our character. File, Export, FBX is one option. You could also do OBJ. It doesn't really matter. And now, name it. And over here, make sure you limit your export to selected objects because we don't need a camera or anything. And all the other settings don't really matter in this case. Export. And on Mixamo, we have to click Upload Character here on the right. It'll open this window and we can select our character file. And it uploads. This could take a while or be really quick. So even if it might need a couple minutes in some cases, don't worry too much. Mixamo is processing your character. And here we have Mira. She's white, like we said, so we don't worry about the textures. And in case your character imports not frontally, so maybe it looks like this or is even from behind, you can use these axis buttons to correct that. So make sure that your character is in a T-pose viewed from the front like this. Then hit Next. And here is where we actually start the rigging process. So Mixamo itself has an auto rigging process, which is a little bit weaker than the AcuRig that Sepp showed you in the optional video, but is very powerful. All you have to do is move these little dots to the corresponding points. So this is the chin. These are the wrists. These are the elbows. It's entirely possible that your character isn't symmetrical like Mira here, though. And all you have to do to move these individually is just hit this Use Symmetry checkbox, and then you can move them however you want. But in my case, they are symmetrical, so I don't have that problem. Knees. And finally, the groin. And this is how the auto rigger on Mixamo knows how to place the bones. So we hit Next, and then it's going to start auto rigging. And this could take up to two minutes. When it's done auto rigging, it'll give you this nice little preview animation where you can already see your character moving. And this is always a really cool effect, especially when you've been working with this still character for a while and for the first time can see it moving like this. It's really fun. When we hit Next, it gets imported, and now we can pick our animations. My favorite is absolutely this silly dancing. And this is where you start to see the value of these settings here. So character arm space might be a problem. You can see her arm kind of goes into her body. So to adjust, yeah, you see the character arm space is now bigger, and she no longer overlaps with herself. But let's take a walk animation, something that's actually useful for our project. You can search walk, and you get a bunch of different options. So Mira the character is very self-assured. She doesn't really have a fear of the dark. So we might find kind of a more casual walk. She's also holding a flashlight. So walk with briefcase might work. Or for a little variety, we can have this start walking animation. So she starts standing, and then begins her walk. Yeah, let's actually do that. Because then I can show you how to combine this with a normal walking animation and use both in your Blender project. What we're going to do next is click Download. And in here, we can pick our formats. So FBX binary is perfectly fine. With skin, without skin, let's do with skin, and frames per second. The closest to what we're working with is 24. But that's no problem if we're going to work with 25. Keyframe reduction, we can leave on none. And that'll download. Now what do we do in Blender? How do we bring this in? Well, let's go back to, let's actually first plug our texture back into base color, because we want it back. And now we can go back to layout. And what's going to happen is we can now file import the FBX. And you'll see this new character with an armature appear. Now, important point, if you're using my startup file, it begins at frame 1000. And the reasons for that you've already learned. But you might be confused if you play why your character isn't moving. Well, that's because the keyframes for the animation are all the way over here on zero, you can't even see them. And so we need to move these over to 1000. And the way to do that is make sure the armature is selected. Down here in keyframes in the timeline, hit A to select all of them. And G, just like you would move a model, you can also move the keyframes over. You zoom in with the scroll wheel, or with a numpad period, fill your screen with all these keyframes. And now we have the keyframes on the first frame. Next up, we want to get our textures back and replace this still model with a no armature. So first, let's move this model with M into a new collection, just call it backup, just keep it just in case, but then hide it with the checkbox. Now we select this, go over here to the materials tab. And instead of having material 01, which is a copy with the base color white, we just need to click here and bring back the old material. And suddenly, you'll see she has her skin back. Now we can hit play. And our character is walking. Isn't that cool? So how do we bring in other animations? Well, that's pretty easy. So first thing we're going to do is actually change these keyframes into something called an action, which is much easier to handle than all of these individual frames on all of the different bones. For that, we're going to click over here and switch into the so called dope sheet under animation. And then from dope sheet, we change into the action editor. At first glance, the action editor might look quite similar to the timeline because you also have all your keyframes here with all this complexity. But the cool thing about the action editor is that you can use it to summarize all of these keyframes into individual, easier to use actions. So first of all, let's name our action. This is not a helpful name, Armature Mixamo.com Layer 0. So let's call it start walking. And now with all of your keyframes selected, you can press push down and it'll disappear from here. Where did it go? Into the so called NLE or nonlinear animation editor. If you click here, you'll immediately see there is your start walking animation. You press play, you can view it. But now here's the magic of actions. If you select it, you can actually move it. And now it will start over here in the timeline. You can also easily change the speed at which it moves by simply scaling it. So let's scale. And now if you play it, you'll see it moves much, much slower without changing the underlying keyframes, which is what makes this so powerful. Next up, let's say this was an animation that you could more easily loop than something like start walking. How do you loop it? Well, over here. If you're not seeing this, this is kind of like the end panel up here in the viewport that you already know. So if you don't see it, just hit N and it'll pop up. And now under action clip, you can actually set how often it repeats. So let's just have it repeat a couple times. This won't make any sense, but you'll understand the principle. It just pops right back to keyframe number one. So instead of having to copy all these keyframes and keep these thousands of keyframes in mind, action editor has you covered with its action strips. So very, very easy. Of course, this doesn't make sense right now. So let's bring the repeat back to one and go to Mixamo to find a cool walking animation that Mira can do after she starts. Now, let's say we wanted to add a standard walk that she continues on after starting. So for that, we're just going to click standard walk and you'll see that this is a nice looping animation. One thing I do want to adjust in the settings here, though, is that she doesn't go from A to B, but in place. So we can continue it indefinitely without her popping back to the start every time. So let's download that. Keep all these settings the same. They should still be the same as last time anyway. The next step is very easy. What we can do is just file import FBX, select the standard walk FBX that we downloaded and import. And it's going to import its own new object because that's what Mixamo always does. But we don't actually need this model in this case. So you can either just delete it here or on Mixamo when downloading hit without skin in the selections when downloading, which just imports the armature. In Armature 0, all we have to do is remember that the animation starts at frame zero. So we'll bring that back, have it start at 1000 so we're not confused. And that's all we need to do with Armature 01. So now you can right click it, select hierarchy and hit M, put it in your backup and it's gone. So how do we bring this animation to Armature 01, like the original one that we have and that we want to see the animations on? It's very easy. We just go to the action editor and here you will see Armature 01 Mixamo.com as an available animation for this armature as well. So if we play that you'll see this nice little walking loop that we wanted. Now we can rename this as standard walk. I recommend using the name of the Mixamo animation so we're always sure where something came from. And then we can hit push down and it'll move over here into non-linear animation as its new track. And now you might wonder why can we no longer see start walking? That's because over here in the end panel you'll see blending replace and that means that every track on top of another one will completely replace the animation below. There are some other settings that I'll show you in just a So as before we can put the animation wherever we like and since it's a walk I'm actually going to repeat it a couple times to really show you that perfect looping animation that we can do with the action editor. But how do we blend this nicely with the start walking animation? Which looks like this. For our purposes blending is actually very easy. You just need to select the track, click auto blend in out, start walking, auto blend in out. And then if we hit play the following is going to happen. He starts walking and then pops back before getting into the walk cycle. This is because the walk cycle is animated on the y-axis here at the center of the world while the end of the start walking cycle has her hip bone which defines the movement of the whole over here at the end. So how do we fix this? Well we select her armature, go here into the armature object data properties down here under viewport display and click in front so we can see all of her bones in the front. Then we select the standard walk clip, the strip here, hit tab so we see the keyframes and then go into pose mode. Next we're actually going to annotate here in Blender because we need to mark where her start walking animation ends on the y-axis. So we have the hip bone selected in this case, make sure it's the hip bone, so Mixamo rig hips and go to the very end of your animation where the popping starts. Then select this annotation, annotate line and just draw a line like this. And now we're actually going to change the keyframe of this hip bone here. The way we do that is we switch into the graph editor and here you're going to see all of the keyframes for this hip bone and we only need to change one, namely the z location actually. So it's not the y location because this hip bone has its own local little system. Don't worry too much about it, if you're not in the right track you'll notice pretty quickly. So we're going to hide all of the other lines here and focus on the z location curve here. If you're not seeing it as well as I am, so if it's like something like this and it's all messed up and you can't actually see any keyframes, all you have to do is hit a and then the period on the numpad and it'll fill your graph editor like this. And now all we have to do with all of these keyframes selected is actually just hit g and then y and y means you're going to move up and down here and all we're going to do is just move all of those lovely keyframes up to our annotated line. And if we now play our animation in the NLE editor that you might see there are still some little bugs like that and for that you can just adjust your blending settings here. For the start walking animation it might not even be necessary to have auto blend in out on. We try that, we see that it transitions pretty smoothly into our standard walk without any jitters or other problems. Now we can also put the bones back so we can actually see our character. Excellent! And now of course our character is just kind of sliding in place. We don't want that, we want to add a new action that moves her forward. And for that we just need to go into the dope sheet again, the action editor, and hit new. Let's name it walk forward, or rather move forward because there's no walking involved. And we need to select our armature and all we need to do is go into pose mode, select our hip bone, hit K to add a keyframe, location, then a little further along in the timeline we G-Y, move her forward a bit, hit K, location again. And now we have this new animation that moves her forward. I think a little bit quickly so we can have it be a little slower by selecting the keyframe and moving it forward in the timeline. Very good! And now you'll see there's this weird little acceleration. So she's slow in the beginning, gets faster, and then slows down again. That's not realistic of course. What we want to do there is select the keyframes, right-click, interpolation, and pick linear. And that will have her walk the same speed everywhere. She's still sliding along the ground a little bit so let's make that animation even slower. Just, yeah, that's decent for now for this example. And now we hit push down again, go into the NLA, and have it start along with the standard walk. It might not be perfect so make sure you check your scaling settings, playback scale, repeat, and you can also manually adjust your blend in and out if it's not to your liking. And in the end result we've successfully combined the start walking animation with a walk cycle which can continue as long as you like and even transition into other animations you may enjoy. So this is a nice method of using existing animations available for free on Mixamo for your project. It's not going to give you the most control possible. Of course you can direct your characters much better using something like Marionette XR or of course touching up your animations manually but this is a great way to get started on your journey.