With Adobe Mixamo currently offering the use of their tools and animations for free, I thought it would be a good time for a standalone tutorial.
Some additional info on making your Mixamo characters look their best in Unreal Engine can be found at https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204336233-UE4-Mixamo-and-Unreal-Engine-4-Animation-Overview
Excellent, thanks. This has saved me a lot of time on a project.
Question related to the output of this program, are the models and animation usable in a commercial project? Also, are any custom graphics brought into Mixamo Fuse still proprietary to my project or do they become public domain?
Man you saved me lot of time… im really stu… well u know i spend all my day retargeting bones for implement my character hahaha you can judge, how noob i was.
THANK YOU!
I was having so much trouble with retargeting and getting twisted and strange results… there are so many animations on Mixamo that I don’t need the ‘stock’ UE4 ones…
In looking at the license multiple times, I see nothing that restricts you from using the output you generate for your own commercial products, nor any loss of proprietary rights over your own custom graphics.
From a July FAQ: “All Mixamo content is royalty free for both commercial and non-commercial use. The only requirement is that the file be embedded in your project. You cannot redistribute the files in .fbx format or any format where the character/animation can be extracted.”
From an FAQ updated this week: “**Can I use Fuse characters commercially?**Yes. Characters created in Fuse can be used for commercial projects royalty free.”
I watched and as I said, thanks for this. Noticed something was wondering about with Mixamo animations… even a basic walk, the character moves forward, which makes for a strange animation, as you push w you move forward but the animation moves the character forward faster, then repeats so it jumps back. Is this an issue that can be fixed or do you have to get into software to modify the animations?
When you create your animation, for many such as the walk animation, you can choose to have them set as ‘in place’ which keeps the animation in one spot versus physically moving. That way, you can move the character yourself through code. There are reasons to choose one over the other, mostly having to do with what other things you might collide with and how you want to structure your code. Look for tutorials on ‘in place’ vs ‘root motion.’ I haven’t made a tutorial on it yet myself.
Yeah just a bit ago I was on Mixamo looking at the animations and found the ‘in place’. Re-downloaded some with that set and works like a champ. Now I need to learn about blend spaces and all that stuff (I guess to use as few animations as I need rather than one for everything?)… I have walking and crouch and prone all set up like I wanted. So much nicer to just use Mixamo animations than deal with all the retargeting stuff.
I’m going to be working on a tutorial series about animation that will probably be posted next week. You have kind of the right idea though - blend spaces create on-the-fly blends between animations rather than you having to create every stage of a transition.
For real? This is great. I’m downloading Fuse right now. But does it work on a subscription basis? If it reverts to its original price will I need to start paying?
At any rate, it’s good to have it.
Right now, everything is free. Once they release Fuse CC as part of Creative Cloud, I doubt there will be much free, at least no more than you might see in trial products of other Adobe products. What you get now while it’s free is yours to use in perpetuity though (according to the license agreement), even once it changes. In other words, whatever characters you create you can still use, though once they change the license for the new CC version, anything after that will be subject to the new license.
UPDATED TO ADD: Just to be clear - I am in no way affiliated with Adobe nor Mixamo - I’m just a fan of the apps, so final info would come from them. This is just my understanding of the license currently.
Thanks for the tutorial. I was messing around with Fuse for the past few days and was wondering why my characters were turning out bad.
I would mention though that the characters created in Fuse will not be as fully detailed in UE4. I even up’ed the texture resolutions for all of the textures to the max and it still loses some of the detail. I can’t tell if that is due to having it go through the auto-rigger upload and download process or something else.
Also, I will mention that character’s eyelashes need to be updated once everything is imported, as they appear will solid. To do this, the eyelash material needs to be opened and the bottom white pin of the texture sample node needs to be connected to the opacity pin, and the blend mode needs to be set to Translucent. You can see a picture of what I’m talking about at the bottom of this page: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums
I’m not really a fan of the Mixamo animations, so I will be stuck with retargeting to Kubold’s animations. In the near future, I will try importing the character and choosing one of the already available UE4 mannequin skeletons to see if it makes the retargeting easier, as right now the imported skeleton bones needs a lot of moving and rotating to match the base pose of the animation skeletons.
There’s a page that gives some instructions on improving the look of Fuse characters with Unreal. I forgot to talk about it in the video. Oops.
https://www.mixamo.com/workflows/unreal
I may edit the video to add that in. It speaks to setting the right channels for transparency and such. I forgot all about it when I was recording. Sorry!
Ah OK, I found it: https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204338093-Tutorial-Fuse-Materials-in-UE4
I’m excited that this can be fixed.
The Marketplace needs more realistic modular humanoid character assets with the UE skeleton. It would be great if someone created a base character asset and then was able to add clothing or texture/skinning packs that can be bought separately but still be integrated into that one character asset. With Fuse, you can create multiple clothing materials to fit one humanoid that can be then imported into UE; I’m pretty sure this can be done without rigging either.
Your tutorials are great, can’t wait to see more in the future.
I looked at that, first problem is I click on the speculars as they say (There are none titled roughness) and then click on one and there is no ‘property matrix’… was this info done with an old version of the engine and that went away? So tired of tutorials that do not match the actual engine…
It was done with an older version. After looking around, you need to go to Asset Actions > Bulk Edit via Property Matrix.
The ones that are titled roughness don’t get imported when you import the Mixamo character. You need to go back to your unzipped folder, go into the Textures folder, and the roughness materials should be there. You have to import those manually.
Yeah found those, thanks for the info on how to go to Proerty Matrix, I ended up loading every one and doing them individual, that’s a pain. BTW, after you do that it causes the spec to get an error in each material… had to drag in the new one’s to replace.
Will the original Fuse be called Fuse cc, or is that an entirely new program. I bought the original hoping they would start using pbr materials. Now cc is going to come out and the original is going to possibly never get pbr? Also I would prefer a one time buy for something I want rather than getting cc and all this stuff that I don’t want.
As I understand it from their blog, it will be an updated version of the program and not an update that can be applied backwards. I suspect it will be like most of the Adobe CC Suite int hat you could buy a standalone but the expectation is for people to subscribe to it as it sounds like it will be tightly integrated with Photoshop.