Mixamo animation

[John Bourne]

Hi all:

I am wondering if any of you have used Mixamo characters with Unity 4?  I downloaded a free character with rigging and one free animation from Mixamo to try out yesterday.  The prefab went into unity just great.  However, I couldn't get an animation to play (tried using the standard components Animation and Animate script (putting in the animation provided).  No luck, just the T-pose in the character from Mixamo.  I notice that Mixamo uses the base root animation paradigm - so I suspect that its animations won't work with Jibe - not good..  Hope I'm wrong... If anyone has this working, I'd appreciate a posting about how to do it....

John

[Chris Hart]

Hi John,

 

Good news, the Mixamo animations should work well with Jibe, but since each character’s skeleton is different you may have mixed results trying to use a generic animation with that avatar. All the jibe characters have the same skeleton layout, so you could purchase one animation for one Jibe avatar and use it on any of the 14 avatars available.

 

Try getting the Mixamo animation store editor plugin to try it out – don’t go down the Mechanim route for now, just the standard editor addon they offer for free (though I have used Mechanim with a Jibe avatar and it worked great, but it is a new technique to learn).

 

Try previewing any animation by selecting your character as the base prefab. I have tried this with numerous skeleton styles, only one of them asked me to do an additional step so Mixamo could recognize the skeleton, the rest had no issues. But once it’s happy, you should be able to preview and then purchase the animations from their store (some are as cheap as $5 which makes them a good test), then set up your prefab character to have that animation in their list of available animations. Useful tip – you can rename the mixamo animations after importing them without issue as long as you do it within Unity.

 

Try adding that prefab character to a completely empty scene and drop the Animate script on them, asking it to play back that same animation.

 

It should work without issue – let us know how you get on.

 

Chris

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[John Bourne]

Thanks Chris:

I will spend some time and try out more and see if I can get this to work.  You might have the answer to the question about how one can add characters.  I found it hard to understand just how to create new outfits for the characters.  (I am wanting to create new characters for a nursing simulation with 19th century clothes).  I think I noted you-all used animeeple when you were at RG – but since that software has now disappeared I wonder what the best thing to use is?    I figured I could use POSER and that is possible, (I think), but probably not the best.  

thanks,

John

[Chris Hart]

Mixamo is definitely the best resource for animations, it’s simple to use and quite flexible. For example, I found that a simple walk animation could be adjusted before purchasing (using their UI) to suit either a lady in a dress or a swaggering soldier with broad shoulders. If your avatars all share the same skeleton, you can reuse it for multiple avatars. The cost of each animation is far less than the personal cost of making them by hand or hiring an artist to create them for you. Most animation cases can be solved in this way.

 

Unity’s own animation system can actually do a reasonable job of basic animation, once you get the hang of it – though again it will take time. The UI is not perfect and tutorials are scarce, but you can create a new animation clip in Unity, then set key frames for joints at the start and end of a cycle. Position that joint at each keyframe and the animation will smoothly interpolate between those points when it plays back. I used it for a herald blowing a medieval trumpet, and for animating a rat running around a cellar (he had a run animation already, so I just used the Unity animation editor to change his position smoothly over time).

 

Creating new outfits over the existing meshes is a photoshop job, but altering meshes requires skills in a graphics program such as Maya, 3Ds or Blender. I would recommend contacting local colleges and schools and look out for interns, since a lot of art and design courses will teach some of these skills.

 

I would also recommend asking the RG team if they can help with some of the avatars we used on some of the projects in the past year – I imagine 19^th century would require ladies in longer skirts – and there are definitely some of those meshes already created that you could work with.

[Jake Goldberg]

As long as we're talking avatars, Does anyone know of a way to layer skins onto an avatar mesh (or otherwise be able to select outfit tops and bottoms separately). Thanks.

[Chris Hart]

A good question – here’s something I tried out a year or two ago:

 

1.      Get hold of something like Strumpy Shader Editor (on the Asset store, nice and free)

2.      Take some time out in photoshop and make a layered outfit file, starting from the minimum and working up to at least a top and pants layer.

3.      Save each layer as an image with transparency around the edges of each part – so like a flip book of transparent slides, you would be able to start from underwear and layer on the clothing by adding each layer.

4.      Create a new shader (not as hard as it sounds if you know photoshop / concept of image layers and how to blend them) and make a series of nodes that adds a texture at each point.

 

Concept of shaders – you define nodes, then either add / multiply / take parts of a channel and combine them into a new output – so I could take a texture node, add a red channel and I would have a red top. Or I combine two png images with transparency, and instead of just a top layer, I would have a complete “top-and-pants” stylish combo. An example of one of the Unity basic shaders – a Diffuse shader. Two simple inputs, Texture + Color = colorful texture. Another one: Bumped Diffuse = texture + bump + color. It goes up from there – and you will see boxes with names in the inspector for each input to a shader. I saw the idea of an Avatar Outfit shader in my mind, with texture inputs for skin, clothing options, and tinting, where each node could be controlled in a dressing room scene.

 

Essentially, the naming convention I started in Jibe for skin and wig were the start of that line of thinking, and I have a project I played around with doing exactly what I overviewed here as a proof of concept of making tintable clothing. Each clothing layer would have its own name, starting from skin, working up to top, pants, jacket, etc. And each layered image could be swapped out, so one day you would have long sleeved top, the next you could be in a tshirt.

 

Limitations of this: it’s layered images on the same mesh, so you would ideally link each layer to a bump / normal of some sort to apply a little illusion of depth – increases the complexity of the shader, and doesn’t actually add depth. Plus, you’d have to do a bit more recoding of the avatar system to accept these sorts of inputs in a dressing room context.

 

Alternatives: extra mesh layers attached to the avatar that could be textured using different clothing options. Requires 3d modelling skills.

 

If the first option sounds interesting then I can probably zip up that test project I made so it can be disassembled for further analysis, though it’s a little rough around the edges J

 

Chris

[Jake Goldberg]

Thanks Chris. I'd very much like to have a look at your test project. 

Jake