Using Adobe Mixamo Fuse CC (Preview) With UE 4.11 (should work with 4.10/4.12 as well)

In this, the first tutorial in the ongoing ‘Tools for Success’ videos, I look at the latest incarnation of character creation tool Adobe Mixamo Fuse CC (Preview). In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a character in Fuse, rig it in Mixamo, import it into Unreal Engine 4.11, and use both Mixamo and non-Mixamo animations with it in your game!

Adobe Mixamo Fuse CC: https://www.mixamo.com/fuse

That retargeting workflow is very messy. When you have over 100 animations built to the UE4 Mannequinn you don’t really want to deal with Mixamo. In our project for example we have over 600 animations and there is no way i want anyone trying to get retarget those animations and after that adjust those animations manually.

There are 2 solutions to this :

  • Use Adobe Motionbuilder for proper retargeting by creating/using rigs.
  • Use the Mannequinn Skeleton in the first place and rearrange rotations of the skeleton in Maya (That’s actually Mixamo’s job to keep their content uptodate with the engine)

Otherwise, great tutorial on how to import Mixamo Characters to UE4.

Thanks for the tutorial, liked it on youtube. :slight_smile:

Can you make a tutorial on how to rig multiple animations?

For example the magic locomotion pack + 1 attack? How would go about rigging those? From idle to running isn’t a problem for me, it is the crouching/moving left/moving right/attacking, that is the problem.

There are no tutorials on Youtube on how to do this as far as I know.

Just keep in mind, Fuse should be used for Placeholder characters, not Promotional Materials or Final Game. Else your game will look as dead as a doornail with the way the program makes there characters look. At The Mountains of Madness has this problem. :confused:

I don’t think that is a problem with how Fuse makes the characters look.

“At The Mountains of Madness” strikes me as a very very early alpha (therefore a bad example anyway) - one of those games that would have benefited a great deal from staying under wraps a lot longer before going the EA route or simply one where the ambition of the devs by far exceeds their talent.
It has TONS of problems, with utter lack of polish being the common denominator.
If a game like that used any other software to create characters and didn’t bother to apply proper shaders, any kind of face animation or head turn mechanics (for NPCs), fine tune character movement instead of insta-rotating NPCs to face the player with short repetitive idle animations all over the place etc. etc. …it would look cheap and broken and rigid no matter how high quality the character models would be.

I think Fuse as a CC toolkit is more than fine. As long as you use the models and animations as parts in a pipeline and not as out-of-the-box game-ready plug&play assets, they should be adequate for much more than just throwaway placeholders.

Considering of course, we’re talking Indie and not AAA dev with own mocap setups and actors at the ready.

Mountains is only one example. My point still stands. The character’s, no matter the customization you make, will look deadpan, even with good animation. Its the way the characters are modeled that have an unnervingly creepy and basic look that really distracts from most designs. Again, it’s like using Poser. There is a look that can’t be changed. You can easily figure out if someone was done in Poser, therefore what I say is the same thing I get when someone does something with Fuse. You can have ****** animations with beautiful character models and still look and feel better. I’ve used Fuse for prototyping. But by no means will I use it beyond that (Except maybe for the base skeleton and the option to use Mixamo animations). I had to heavily modify outside of Fuse with my model to get something presentable.

Like I said, my point still stands. I WOULDN’T recommend using it for a final product or marketing if you respect the visual image of your product at all, no matter if you’re an indie or AAA.

I’m willing to tackle that. I’m currently caught up in a solo dev series and getting a couple of other tutorials finalized, so maybe in a few weeks!

Would be great, if you could show us, what exactly you did to take away these shortcomings. Do you have some examples of your project with Fuse prototypes and final characters?