Mixamo to UE4 - Is there an alternative?

Hey guys,

since mixamo does not provide rigs for UE4 anymore I asked myself if there is an alternative?
Mixamo was always a quick solution for ‘‘pretty good rigs’’.

Thanks!

Are you talking about the auto-rigger?

Why not just retarget the animations to a mannequinn like rig? I do so and it works great. Granted setting up the base pose the first time is a pain.

Hi, could you maybe show me this step-by-step? I have been searching for days to find a solution, and I just want my characters from Fuse/Maximo to share the animations made by Unreal Engine. I’m running the 4.15 version, and I can’t seem to get anywhere, regardless of the many youtube tutorials I’ve seen out there.

This wouldnt be a problem, but since mixamo removed the UE4 support I’ve went into problems which I cant fix at the moment.
I always get an error while importing the the fbx file… I dont know why…

Heya Guys,

Just a quick video showing 1 way to do what this post is asking. This is a video to demonstrate some of the things that can be learned from joining my patreon page.

Unreal Engine 4 - (Tutorial) Using Adobe Fuse And Mixamo In UE4 With Retargeting
v=hw-zr2In2P8

If you like what you learn in this video feel free to join my patreon page at the $10 tier and you will gain access to every tutorial video I make now and in the future!

Thanks Guys

only have access if you pay?
yuck.
<_<

The video I linked is free…But yes there are a lot of things that are for patreons only, whats wrong with that?

I made this :slight_smile:

Good one, Ah so you upload just the epic rig up to mixamo rigger and then after baking load the mixamo animations back into unreal engine then target to the epic rig, now all your other custom rigs can now use the new mixamo epic animations?.. I was uploading my commander’s custom rig instead of using epic’s rig.

Ok so what happens if the mixamo animations don’t get baked?

Hi tozan,
you are not OBLIGED to use epic’s main mesh, the only condition is to use a character that is in the A pose (I used the mannequin because it is a common model).
Answer :
You’ll have to map all the bones manually, then rotate,scale… etc some bones(fingers for example) to get a nearly perfect results; however, the plugin will compute the hierarchy of the skeleton and do it for you in a perfect way.

you can actually still use auto rigger… all you’ve got to do is download their 3ds max auto cat script, which will automatically convert the mixamo rig into a cat skeleton, you can use as is, but my issue with this is that it doesn’t create a root bone at the feet, best thing to do is select the skeleton left platform right platform and base pelvis and drag them onto the base human, which can serve as your root bone, then reupload the new hierarchy to mixamo, and all the animations will work except now you’ll have a unreal engine 4 root bone… hope this helps…

I am not using Maya or 3ds max to run a special cat script file to fix Mixamo. I only got Blender for 3d modeling software, but I think the FBX pipline is faulty in Blender.

I need to know what the IMPORT Settings are for Blender to
beable to sucessfully load in the Epic Rig in its proper default A-Pose position without it changing the bone positions.

In Unreal Engine in the skeleton editor you can put the mannequin in either the T or the A pose position and the clavicals will stay in their proper V shape in the chest area and the thigh leg bones will not separate away from the hips and move down into the legs.

But Blender is doing that to the rig soon as you import it in and I don’t know why.

So I conclude there is a bug in the Blender Software armature code that is causing the bones to separate when putting it in the T position because the bones don’t separate in Unreal Engine…

Even tho I made a plugin that fixes all the issues you mentioned above, you still can do it manually, in fact; you’ll need to set up the hierarchy of the skeleton then add a root bone to the whole armature.
One main problem : mapping. but I think that doing it once will free-the-bird and you can keep importing the animated skeleton later on.
I Hope that this helps.

Okay, I haven’t used this plugin yet. Blender pulling apart the bones sounds like a bug in the program. It would be good if we can come up with a program that makes armatures more fluid instead of the rigid state Blender has them in.

The need for character development has always been an issue of games development that has and is unique as to the demands of the need for function of design. Is there a need for a plug-n-play solution or is the demand for unique franchise characters as part of the over all brand development of the game determines the options that are available either off the shelf or as a preferred application as part of the development pipeline.

So yes there are many options available if you are willing to pay the price and in general digital people have always been available but rather expensive as to the budget needs of the Indy developer but as UE4 continues to improve there are more and more options being made available due to the fact that UE4 does not have hard coded limitations to work around based on the need to figure things out via iteration and discovery as to a possible solution.

Is an off the shelf solution as an alternative to Mixamo a solution?

Well yes and no as in using the frame work as a base to work from but common asset use tends to be pointed out as yet another instance of asset flipping and most players you hope to attract to your game will focus more on lazy games development of you selling someone else work even if you have full fair use rights to.

So

The question that needs to be asked and answered is the need for usable digital people for the purpose of exploration or are you looking for a solution that is part of the requirement of your project as a video game product?

Either case my alternative of choice would be Daz Studio and the Genesis 3 frame work, for which we have purchased a license extension to make use of, not for the purpose of making a dial-a-character but to included the rigging and pathway options with out having to reinvent the wheel.

The only con is DS is a serious general use application with out the attachment and ease of use factor that it’s use is limited to “just” Unreal 4 as advertised on the package sticker so does have a rather step learning curve but once you learn usable tools and all you want is digital people to play around with is by far the best solution I’ve found.

I’ve been using Mixamo for the past few days now and it works flawlessly.

Obviously I’ve run into the same problems as others when it comes to trying to implement the Mixamo models and animations with the default UE4 mannequin, but I don’t see what the big deal is.
Just forget about the UE4 mannequin and its skeleton for now and stick to Mixamo skeleton and animations so you won’t have to convert any skeletons or anything like that.
It took me only about a few hours to fully replace the WASD third person template mannequin with a custom Mixamo character with its own animations. (And I’m a complete noob at this)
Again - I seriously don’t see what the big deal is. Sucks that using Mixamo assets with the Mannequin skeleton used to work, but now that it doesn’t there’s still not much effort required in discarding the mannequin assets entirely.

Most people buy characters from the marketplace, which are to rigged to Epic’s skeleton…

If this is a case of emergency, which forces you to meet a specific deadline, and you cannot afford 12$ - I can give it to you for free.

You don’t need an Unreal 4 specific plugin for Mixamo/Fuse. Just export the Fuse character as an OBJ and you can upload it to Mixamo for the auto rigging. Then download the character as a standard FBX and import into UE4. There’s no need for anything else. If you want to use it with the UE4 Mannequin’s animations, just use Retargeting for that. It’s built into the engine. v=bitBh8E923w Jump to 3:30 if you want to skip the whole process of downloading a character from Mixamo.