Makehuman and Mixamo

Character design, rigging and adding motion are crucial elements of any animation.  

I was recently introduced to the Makehuman community. It is an open-source tool for making 3D character, which then can be saved and exported straight to Unity or, alternatively uploaded to Mixamo where we can animate them first and next download to Unity to develop our project further. 

Makehuman has quite a few options allowing users to customize their characters. It let us to model character’s elements such as gender, weight, height or muscles, as well as work on the appearance through adjusting geometries, including hair, teeth, clothes etc. In general, it is a good straightforward tool, a bit limited when it comes to the variety of available options. There is however database with additional assets available to download. 

Mixamo, originally created by Stanford University, is an online character animation platform. It consists of two parts, characters and animations. User can pick a character and then add an animation to it – one of hundreds available. Otherwise, we can upload own character in a T-pose, place markers on it and start auto-rigging process (creating digital skeleton allowing to mimic real-life motions) to then be able to add any chosen animation to our 3D model. Mixamo is a very user-friendly tool, simple to use and smoothly working. It lets me create projects content in a very efficient way. 

Next, after importing animated assets to Unity, the work continues there. I need to make sure I change all the options to desired ones, such as humanoid instead of generic animation type. Animation controller must be created and assigned, as well as model placed in the right placed in both, hierarchy and inspector. When all is set up properly, the animation works. It sometimes takes a bit more time to adjust options or find the element I have forgotten about, but it is a learning process which I am enjoying.