Mixamo

What is Mixamo?

Mixamo is Adobe's free web service for character rigging and animation. You upload a character model, the service auto-rigs it with a skeleton in minutes, and then you can browse thousands of ready-made animations and apply them to your character with a click.

It started as a San Francisco startup in 2008, made a name for itself by automating the tedious rigging process, and was acquired by Adobe in 2015. Since then it has stayed free, which made it a staple for indie game developers and hobbyist animators everywhere.

The appeal is simplicity: no downloads, no paid license, and output that drops straight into Unity, Unreal, Blender and other tools via FBX.

Key Features

• One-click auto-rigging for humanoid character models
• A large library of thousands of motion-captured animations
• Animation retargeting across different character proportions
• Web-based, so nothing to install and it works on any machine
• Free download of rigged characters and animations as FBX
• Character upload in common formats like FBX and OBJ

How to get started

Open mixamo.com and sign in with a free Adobe account. You can pick one of the starter characters to experiment with or upload your own model in FBX or OBJ format.

Mixamo asks you to place a few markers on the character to align the skeleton, then rigs it automatically. From there you browse the animation library, preview motions in the viewport, and download the character and animations as FBX files.

• Sign in to mixamo.com with a free Adobe account
• Upload your character model in FBX or OBJ
• Place the joint markers and let the auto-rigger build the skeleton
• Browse the animation library and preview motions
• Download the rigged character and selected animations as FBX
• Import the FBX into Unity, Unreal or Blender

Use cases

• Quickly rigging characters for game jams and indie prototypes
• Getting placeholder animations into a game while the team waits for custom work
• Learning animation retargeting and rigging fundamentals
• Adding idle, walk, run and combat animations to humanoid characters
• Populating VR and AR scenes with animated avatars

Pricing and licensing

Mixamo is completely free to use with an Adobe account. There is no subscription and no per-asset fee.

Animations are licensed royalty-free for use in your projects, which is what makes the service so popular with indies. As with any free service, check the current terms on the site, since Adobe occasionally updates the license wording.

Pros and cons

The strengths are obvious: it is free, fast, runs in the browser, and the animation library covers the most common human motions. Auto-rigging handles humanoid characters well and exports integrate cleanly with major engines.

Limitations exist too. Non-humanoid or heavily stylized characters can confuse the auto-rigger, the animation style is uniform motion capture, and there is no way to edit animations in the browser, so you will polish them in your own tool afterward.

Alternatives

• Rokoko Vision: free video-based motion capture in the browser
• DeepMotion: AI mocap from video with a physics-based character controller
• Cascadeur: physics-aware keyframe animation software
• Blender: free open-source 3D suite with its own rigging tools
• Reallusion Character Creator and iClone: commercial character and animation pipeline