Mixamo addon for Blender 2.8/2.9/3.0

welcome to cg dive in this video we'll take a look at the miximo add-on for blender it was released a couple of months ago and it is pretty awesome considering that it is a completely free tool miximo allows us to do cool stuff already we can rig a character online using the miximo tools then we can apply to it any of hundreds of animations available on miximo and bring it back to blender however with the add-on we can also give our character a control rig while keeping the miximo animations intact and the control rig was a missing piece of the puzzle when using maximo which is why people wanted to transfer these miximo animations to rigify or autoric pro or other custom rigs right now on cg dive i'm working on a series about retargeting and that is the process of transferring an animation from one rig to another rig when you learn retargeting properly you have a lot of freedom to transfer animations from any source rig to any target trick so if that's something that you would like to learn about check out my retargeting playlist but for people who want to keep things simple this miximo add-on can be a great alternative the obvious limitation of course is that you can only use rigs and animations from miximo itself with that in mind let's get started so of course first we need to get the miximo add-on you can get it from this link which i'm going to share with you and when you get here just click on get the add-on and a zip file will be downloaded do not unzip this file just place it somewhere where you can find it then go to blender edit preferences add-ons install find your add-on install it and activate it that's it just like any other blender add-on and here in the add-on options you can change the top where miximo will appear i'll keep the default miximo tab and close this window and now we can go to the miximo tab and here are the add-on features and the create control rig button is where the magic happens but it's important to understand which rigs can be converted to control rig with this feature and which cannot otherwise you may end up being confused and i watched all tutorials that are currently available about this addon and none of them mentions these pitfalls so one obvious way to get miximo characters and animations is to go to the miximo website this service is free but you're going to need to sign up for it so if you don't have an account sign up i already have one so i'm going to log in once i'm logged in i can start choosing my character and my animations and to show you the problem i'm going to choose two characters first go to character and search for ninja and i'm going to choose this ninja model apply some animation to it any animation is fine maybe this one and then i'm going to download it with these default settings okay then i'm going to go back to characters and search for bot and i'm going to choose the export okay and it will have the same animation already applied so i'm going to download it again okay and now in blender i'm going to actually open another instance of blender and let's have them side by side like this and in the first one i'm going to import fbx go to the folder where i downloaded these files and now miximo names these files with the name of the animation that you used so both of them will be named the same but the first one that i downloaded was the ninja so i'm going to import it here and here it is the ninja and in the other instance of blender i'm going to import fbx again select the second file that i got from miximo and i'm going to import it and by the way i'm using the default fbx settings i'm not changing anything here so import fbx here we have our bot as well and in both files we have the same animation okay and now let's select the rig of the ninja go to the miximo tab and create control rig i'll just use the default settings and as you can see it worked we have the animation still but we have these arms in ik mode and legs in ik mode and these spine controls head controls and so on i'm going to go over them in more detail a little bit later but now let's go to the other instance of blender select the rig only go to the miximo tab and again create control rig press ok and we'll get an error and so let's undo and also undo here and let's go to wireframe mode so that we can see the skeleton of these characters so as you can see the skeleton of the ninja maybe if i go to a rest position you'll see that all bones are kind of oriented in a good way in a proper way whereas the bot rig has these weirdly oriented bones they still work if i rotate them they're going to deform the character correctly but the orientations are all wrong so there is one thing that you can do if i just delete this character that i have and then import again fbx i'm going to select the bot fbx and in the armature i'm going to enable automatic bone orientation and import fbx and now in post position you'll see that the rig looks much much better the bones are mostly oriented correctly so let's let's go back to post position and try to create control rig and this time we didn't get an error it seems to work but you can see that the legs are inverted incorrectly and the arms as well so the conclusion is that some characters which you can download directly from miximo you will be able to create control rig for them but others won't work and the reason for that is that there are a couple of different rigs really on miximo even though all of them are humanoid and look very similar there are a couple of different specifications they probably come from different iterations of the software i honestly don't know which characters have the right rig and which don't and i don't want to download and test all of them and so we need a better solution so there is one thing that works reliably and that is uploading your own unrich character into miximo rigging it with the miximo rigging tools and that will create the exact rig structure that the add-on can work with so you can use your own humanoid characters or if you absolutely want to use one of the miximo characters then you should download it remove its rig and then upload it back to miximo unrigged and rig it again here i have a custom model that i'm going to be using for demonstration and you'll see that i have it in tipos or apos so you can use either of these as your default poles either will work fine um so i'm going to go with the typos so i'm going to place this character in the center of the world select it and then i'll go to file export fbx and then in the settings i'm only going to take selected objects and that way i'll only export the object that i selected and all other objects will be ignored and then i'm going to export my model then let's go back to miximo click upload character [Music] grab the fbx that i exported and drop it in here then you'll get this view make sure that your character is pointing forward that you can see the face of the character click next and then rig it with the miximo tools which are very simple and very intuitive just place the chin the wrists elbows knees and groin and click next and this process can take around two minutes but when it's done you'll have a rigged and weighted character okay here we have a little test animation that should show us if the process was successful and it seems good so press next and here we have a new character playing the animation that we chose of course we can go back to animations and choose another one this one for example and now i'm going to download this character with the default settings i'll go back to my blender scene and simply create a new scene i'll start over and now i can import my fbx import fpx dropkick and i'll import with the default settings if i take a look at my armature it is looking good the bones seem to be oriented correctly even though i didn't touch the fpx import settings so now i can select this armature go to miximo and let's go back to pause position and click create control rig with the default settings press okay and there we go we have our animation but we also have our control rig that we can use to maybe fix this animation improve it change it or we can keep creating custom animations and that's all you need to do if you just want one single animation however it will be more common that you want to use a bunch of different miximo animation on this same rig so here is what you could do let's undo switch the pulse position and now i'm going to click zero out rig and what this do is important it will completely delete your current animation it will delete all keyframes and so on and it will place your character in the rest position from this position i'm going to create the control rig and let's talk about these options apply animation if you already had an animation on this rig then it will be automatically applied to the control rig in this case we don't have any animation so this option doesn't matter uh and then we have ik arms or ik legs and you don't need to overthink these options this will just set the default settings but you'll be able to switch from ik and fk at any time so i'll uncheck ik arms because it is common for arms to be in fk mode i'll keep ik legs and press ok and here is our rig we have a root control hips control spine controls shoulder the arms are currently in fk mode so i can move them as fk limbs i can manually rotate each part of the arm and the legs are in ik mode which means that i can grab them here and move the foot and the leg will follow and we also have this pull target to orient the knee we have a few more controls this one will lift the foot while keeping the toes on the ground this one controls only the toes and this one which you have to move actually you don't rotate this gizmo you move it and if you move it up and down you get this motion so you can place the character on its toes or on its heel and if you move it left and right you get this roll of the foot okay i'll select all clear all transforms and that's basically it we have a neck control and head control very simple and as i said you can switch between ik and fk arms and legs at any point so if i just select one of the arm controls doesn't matter which one i can go to the miximo rig settings and switch this value to zero and that will give me ik hands again i have a pull target and i can do the same on the other side okay and the legs can also be switched to fk but usually you'll want the feet in ik so i'll switch back to ik and i'll select all and again clear all transforms to bring my rig in the default position and that's it for the control rig overview it is fairly simple but still quite powerful one last thing if you want to change the shape or size of any of these widgets you can select it and press edit control shape and that will place you in edit mode you can then scale down the gizmo or move any of its vertices or do any modeling operations that you want and once you're done simply press apply control shape and now your shape will have this shape functionally it is exactly the same okay now we know how to create a control rig we also understand when this operation will work and when it may fail and so now how do we use maximo animations on this rig so i still have the original fbx animation that i downloaded for this rig so let's import it again import fbx and here is the drop kick import it move it to the side in here i don't really need the character anymore so i can delete it and then in the animation section i'm going to use the eyedropper select the new armature that i got and then select the control rig and i'll press apply animation to control rig and now i have this animation applied to this control rig and if i want more animations i can just go back to miximo select another animation download it and this time i can choose without skin and that will make my download a little bit lighter download and to make sure that these animations that we download now will work with a control rig you have to make sure that you are using this character this same character do not change the character keeping that in mind let's choose another animation and download it again without skin and another one download without skin okay you can download as many animations as you want now i can go to import fbx and i can actually control click all the animations that i want to import and press import fbx and that way all animations will be imported with one click and now to apply more animations to my control rig all i need to do is remove this current source skeleton pick another one select my control rig and apply animation okay then i'll pick the next one select my control rig apply animation and the last one and apply the animation okay and now i'm going to edit my interface a little bit i'm going to create a top sheet and switch to action editor and finally i'll create one more window and switch it to nla i like to enable the selected only option in here okay now we have actually four animations that will work with this control rig but in this current state only the active one will be saved and all other animations will actually be deleted when we close and open this file again so there are steps that we need to take to prevent this one way to do this is to use the shield icon for each of our actions so i'm going to do this for the active action and i also want to rename it so this is a vampire byte supposedly then i need to find another animation that works with this control rig okay i'll name this one jump and save it with the shield icon okay this is the jab and save it and this is the goalkeeper action i'll rename it and save it so this is how we add animations to our control rig now i don't need these mocap armatures anymore so i can select them and delete them and now that we have multiple animations for this rig we can also combine them and that will happen in the nla so for example i can choose the vampire bite animation and press push down which will place this animation in the nla and right now it's not visible because i have to select my rig when i have this selected only option enabled then only the nla strips for the selected rig will be visible and then i can switch the active action to something else like the goalkeeper and push it down as well and the nla can be very powerful i'm not going to go into detail here because i already made two videos about the nla you can watch them and everything i mentioned there will be applicable for this control rig and also in the retargeting series we'll be talking about tweaking and changing your retargeted animations and in those videos i'll be talking about the nla again but really quickly we can kind of combine these animations for example i'm going to make the goalkeeper happen after the vampire bite so if we play now we'll get something like this and now there is a harsh transition between the two but if we go to the end panel here strip and we change the blend in option then these two animations will blend in nicely as you can see there is no harsh transition anymore and really quickly i'm going to show you how to create tweak layers if i create a new action and in here in the nla i'm going to select the new action and set the blending to add and this additive layer is a great way to change parts of your animation so in this case for example i could i could select the hands and the hips control and i'm going to add a new keyframe for them and now i'll go a little bit further into the animation and let's say that i want to lower the body of this character so i'll just lower it and add another keyframe and then a little bit later i'll bring it back up add keyframe and if you play through you'll see that the body of the character went down i can now push down this action as well and in here if i select the new action and press h in the nla then you can see the difference that this new layer made but okay let's stop here with the nla again i'll be making more videos about that and i'll try to make sure that these workflows about tweaking animations and changing them make perfect sense um while we're here i can show you the big animation option and right now if i click on it i'll get an error and that is a little bit weird it looks like a minor bug it's not really a bug it works but to make it work i have to create a new action here which is action 002 and now i can press bake animation and it's going to work however it is going to create a new action for it and that makes no sense it asks you to create a new action but then it creates another one but anyway what this feature does is it takes all of the actions that we had combined in the nla and it bakes them into a new single action so now if i play through this you'll see that it is exactly what i had in the nla but it is baked to a different action to a separate action i think we covered almost all features of the add-on it kind of features a gltf export which i think is the same as going to file export gltf so it looks kind of random in here i'm not sure why they decided to edit something else that we haven't talked about yet is the snap features so if i have my hand in fk mode i can use the snap ik fk feature and that will snap the inactive mode to the active mode so if we are in ik mode like here and use this feature then the add-on will switch to ifk mode and snap the fk controls to the current position of the arm and we also have a way to bake the entire action from one set of controls to another set of controls so for example in this case this arm is in ik mode here is the action of the arm in ik mode if i use this feature and press ok it will bake the entire action for this arm in fk mode so here now the arm is in fk mode but i have the same action and i can switch between ik and fk mode and the arm won't change that is because the exact same action is baked on both set of controls which reminds me when you press the apply animation to control rig button then the atom will bake the action on whichever control is active at the moment so if you are in ik mode it will be baked on the ik control and if you are in fk mode it will be baked on the fk controls but with this feature you have the option to bake the other set of controls as well okay that's it for the miximo addon i think we covered all of its features and i hope you do something cool with it cg dive is supported by its patreon and gumroad supporters if you want to join them that will make it much easier for me to bring more content to you but simply liking subscribing and commenting on these videos is also immensely helpful so thank you for watching and i hope to see you in the next one

Channel: CGDive

Views: 9,183

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Id: wYqJ7AyEuhc

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021