Cinema 4d 2024: A Quick Look At Mixamo (Simple Character Rigging and Animations)

in this video what we're going to do is take a quick look at miimo now mixo can be a great way to take an existing character you either modeled or perhaps you purchased online and upload it to uh the mixo website and apply a bunch of different animations that are available to you you can then download the character with the animation and use it in your project as you see fit it's a pretty straightforward and easy process there are though there are a few things you want to keep in mind so let's go ahead and get started all right so let's get started here now you could be doing this with a character you modeled yourself a character you bought online I'm going to just grab a character from the asset browsers by typing in character I'll find this guy called sporty I believe it's ton rig um and I'll drag them in here and you know what I'm going to end up doing is just kind of stripping out all of the rigging here even though this guy is already rigged though I will say if you did have a pre-rig character and you wanted to apply um a mix mixo animation there is a way you can create a mixo control rig by going to character changing the template to say mixo mixo control rig and kind of going through that path so that is definitely beyond the scope of this video what I'm going to do in this case though is get rid of all the rigging like I mentioned and I'm going to make sure to turn down the subdivision uh surface levels here so that way I end up with an unsmoothed character when I export it um and so once I've done that uh all I'm going to do is just right click on my null here that has everything inside and do a connect objects plus delete uh that will get rid of all the rigging although it actually does put all the rigging as a separate spline here that I can now get rid of the eyes ended up looking a little bit strange which actually didn't happen when I did this previously but really shouldn't matter um for our purposes today I'll get rid of all the other nulls and now what I can do uh is get ready to save this out I do want to just double check to make sure there's nothing kind of weird going on like I have this plane down here for whatever reason and so that's definitely something I'm going to want to get rid of so everything's looking pretty good um and now what we can do is export our character go to file export technically U mixo can take um fbx and objs I've had better luck with obj objs which is a bit disappointing because mixo kicks back fbxs and it does make um reapplying your materials a little bit trickier so I wonder if perhaps diving in here and experimenting with the exact version of fbx could um help fix that but I'm going to stick with objs because for me they've worked um right away so I'm just going to go to export here you know replace the one I've already saved and then go to the mixo website now um I'm already logged in so that's why this looks a bit different I believe the options are something like sign up for free or um login now there are characters as well as animations the characters you can find here can switch to any of these characters and apply whatever the last animation you used or whatever the default animation is um and depending on what that animation is you might see some properties to customize it but yeah there's a handful of different characters here you know by no means is this um You Know cover everything you might want for a character but there's definitely some options here um if you want to um experiment uh the big thing though is the animation library and you can either start that process by switching to animations or by uploading your own character so that's what I'll actually do and now it's asking for me to um upload the character so I will go ahead and do that like I said I've had better luck with um objs um the first couple of times I tried fbxs nothing would show up um after this process here so we'll let this process and as it finishes um we will pick this up now I can tell this loaded in correctly because I can actually see my character here when I've tried um fbxs a couple of times nothing showed up here and this looks pretty good however if you do need to make some changes you can see um you are able to do that if you need to rotate your character um on different axes but it is facing straightforward you also want your character being a t- pose um and have the finger spread apart though it is a bit tricky to see that from this particular view um that is something that you would want to pay attention to in cinema 40 or whatever application you're coming from all right now what we are going to do is auto rig this character you can disable symmetry um you can also decide what um skeleton you want to use if you want to have fingers or not um whatever the case may be whatever kind of matches or is the closest to the character you have here now I almost wish it would show a um a view with the lines um or edges on our object is that would make it easier to find the exact location of our elbow and perhaps knee maybe even the groin area um but we'll do the best we can and we do get a little bit of a a magnifier here as we are doing this so I'll just go through and kind of choose as best I can where these different elements are we have the wrist we have the elbows which I'm just going to guess is somewhere around there hopefully towards the middle we have knees once again if I could see the lines or edges on this I could do this a little bit better and then lastly groin okay from there we hit next and it's going to go through an auto rig for us and so once again we will come back once this process process is complete and once it has finished you do get a chance to kind of review this um if you do want to go back and adjust things like the knee position elbow whatever um now is the time to do so you can hit back and now you can enable the skeleton view um I am taking a look at this and going all right maybe you know the hand here is a little bit um messed up um I will say that you know from what I've seen using this character previously that this isn't necessarily the best judge of that um but will see that once we take a look at some of the animation so I'm happy with this I'm going to go ahead and hit next and then I can proceed with this character um and then switch to animations to see what we have there now with these animations um you'll have different properties to really fine-tune them um overdrive tends to kind of speed things up a little bit okay arm space um take a look at that one maybe where it's using the arms a little bit more perhaps I can find one there you I'm not sure zombie biting is the correct one but as you'll see there are lots of different um options here so um they do have a search field which can help come here and check uh the thumbnail size how many you want to see all pretty basic options but notice here what happens is I adjust the arm space right it does kind of make a difference to the way our animation looks and honestly seems like it's bending the arms a little bit more kind of making it closer to the body or further away from the body right so that's you know looking pretty good and looking at the hands you know this is something you're probably going to run into problems with um just because it is auto riged we didn't get a chance to really place the fingers the good news is you can always make some adjustments to the animation in Cinema 4D once we get um this animation out of it all right so so yeah I'm this is looking pretty good you can trim um the length of this animation uh and once you're happy with it well then you download it and few different options here fbx right um for the most part it does have colada as well although it does have some um different options for fbx with or without skin key frames I'm sorry frames per second and if you want key frame reduction um I'm going to keep that off because S40 has its own key frame reduction and I can e go through and do that there if I would like um that way I'm left with all of the animation so I'll just click download and kind of go through this process of getting it back into Cinema 4D it's already downloaded so we can come back into Cinema 4D here find it and drag it up and import it into our file here so you could just choose file import I just dragged it from um Windows explore on to Cinema 4D and it's going to import it for me into its own file and there we go so there's our animation Okay and like I said if you wanted to go in and make adjustments you absolutely could you know open up your timeline right find your rig find the um joint you are looking for in this case we'd probably want you know hand or fingers and then go in and see if we can make an adjustment to it whether it's the wrist to straighten it out and you can see it isn't quite perfect right but if you need some animation quickly you know this is a really really good option now when it comes to the materials right that we had on our original um geometry this is where I uh I wish I had gotten a chance to get fbx to work because what I thought would work is if you know you copied character in here and then copied over all of the relevant information the material tags and selections that it would just work um unfortunately that wasn't quite the case but we'll do it again just to double check here so on the the animated version I'm going to delete the Fong tag as well as the uvw tag I'll copy over all of our materials okay um and then move over our selection tags now really all I needed to do was take a look at our uvws to see if they were the same and perhaps copying leaving the uvw tag would have helped but you can see yeah this isn't quite working so why don't we really quickly see if keeping the uvw the original uvw there and maybe even the Fong tag will help with us help with this I don't believe it will right but that's why it could be even more important Noe to try and get that fbx format to work right and you know when you export something is a different file format it can change the the number the name and Order of the polygons so we can see that if we switch to UV edit um you know looks like it kept some things but not necessarily all of it so let's see no actually it did that's a bit interesting so it must be due um to something in our selection tags here perhaps the order um but that is a good sign that the uvw coordinates um did uh transfer over even if um you know they're not quite showing correctly that at least gives me hope that it is possible to reapply the materials in a pretty easy um manner but that's essentially it for just getting a animation character into mixim Mo getting a rigged animation out and as this character was in a subdivision surface we can always apply that again and now here's what our animation character looks like all smoothed out like we have so with that that will do it for this one if there's anything else you would like to see please leave me a comment down below and if you found this video helpful I'd appreciate it if you could like it and subscribe to the channel and until next time take care

Channel: Behind the Button

Views: 561

Keywords: Cinema 4d, C4d, Tutorial, Animation, F-curve, 3d, timeline, keyframe, character, mixamo, rigging, autorig

Id: hsik0wUgsHg

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024