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Aosys

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I went looking for Unity tutorials, and came across this:

 

https://www.mixamo.com/

 

Mixamo was recently acquired by Adobe, and while Adobe tries to figure out how it wants to go forward from here, all Mixamo services (including models and animations) are, for a limited time, completely free to anyone with an Adobe ID. Their Q&A page states, "Mixamo is available for a limited duration as a technology preview and is available free, without license or royalty fees, for unlimited use in both commercial and non-commercial projects."

 

Animations can be downloaded as FBX (.fbx), FBX for Unity (.fbx), Collada (.dae), Biovision (.bvh), and Biovision for 3ds Max Biped (.bvh). You also have options for FPS, Mixamo skins, and keyframe reduction, as well as tweaks for individual animations. What I'm wondering is, can we use this stuff for TDM? If not, it still works with Unity (for anyone who's interested).

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Sounds interesting.

 

The two places that might be useful are creating character meshes (depending on what kind of clothing they have available), which could then be rigged to our skeleton for new humanoid characters, or seeing if any existing animations that would work for us, since you can apparently upload fully rigged characters.

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There are a lot of animations there, unfortunately I can't download them in any format that my old Maya 7.0 can open. The .fbx I get from the site isn't compatible, and trying to convert it to an older form of .fbx doesn't seem to work either. I can import the mesh but not the animations.

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Unfortunately, I don't have much time to look into this atm, but here's something I found after a quick Google search:

 

https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/categories/200186383

 

It may be possible to get it to work with Blender by the looks of it, but someone will have to confirm this. May also be worth trying 3ds Max, if anyone has that?

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I'm not sure how useful using their humanoid animations would be. I was able to import a builder guard model and have it use their animations, which worked rather well, but there are certain animations that we rely on (the various attack and block ones come to mind) that they probably don't have (although to be fair I didn't look through all 52 pages of animations).

 

They do have a set of zombie animations that would be usable for an alternate zombie character though, if we could get it working.

 

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They have a pretty diverse selection. Some of them (like the sports-related ones, or ones involving guns) probably aren't so useful to us, but others could be. If you hit search, you can actually browse animation genres, and combat animations are one of the categories - they have animations for axes, sword and shield combos, bows, even a claymore if I'm not mistaken. There might be some goods ones under the "Adventure" genre, and looking through I think I saw one or two good ones for NPCs just doing random things. I think there's also some nice spellcasting animations, if we want to work on things like mages and pagans.

 

Out of curiosity, if we started using Mixamo animations, would we be doing so in conjunction with animations we already have? Would it be possible to apply some of these animations (like the crouch) with the player's reflection in mirrors?

 

Also, do you have footage of the builder guard (I'm mighty curious as to what it looks like XD)?

 

[Edit] Ah, ninja'd my post with the video, cheers

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Out of curiosity, if we started using Mixamo animations, would we be doing so in conjunction with animations we already have?

 

 

 

We can't mix and match. Mixamo converts models to its own skeleton, which isn't compatible with ours, so an animated character could use our animations or theirs, but not both. However, if we could replace the majority of our animations with Mixamo ones, I could theoretically recreate any we need that are missing (the site says something about being able to export a rig with preset animation controls to Maya).

 

There are potential issues there though, as things like our sitting and lying down animations are dependent on being at a specific height, our AI speed is based on our current walk/run animations, and there are maps that use existing animations in creative ways, like turning a 'relight torch' animation into a 'pour wine' one. Replacing these animations with Mixamo ones could have unforseen consequences. That's not an unsolvable problem if the animations can be adjusted, but it's more work.

 

Another possibility is that we create characters that would be separate entities, that use only the Mixamo animations. While they may not be fully functional, they could be used for cut-scenes or scripted conversations where extra animations would be useful.

 

Using them for player animations is also a good idea, as there are lots of appropriate ones (crouch, crouch walk, etc). I forget how easy it is to apply animations to the player model though...I remember looking into it years ago and finding it wasn't quite as straightforward as I thought.

 

Of course, all of this is dependent on me being able to import the .fbx files into my Maya 7.0 (or getting an updated version), or someone taking on the task of using Blender.

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Have you tried the Maya Auto-Control Rig Script?

 

Also, for any enterprising Blender users, here's what I found. I'd try it, but I have to relearn Blender first.

 

 

Yeah, I can see how the new animations would break preexisting stuff. I do like the idea of a separate set of Mixamo-animated characters; that seems like the way to go. Who knows: if we can get them to work, we may find they become more usable after refinement, and meanwhile we wouldn't be interfering with what we currently have.

 

Do we have any documentation on the player model? I searched on the wiki and couldn't turn up anything.

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