Rigging and animating a 3D character in minutes with Mixamo - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

and intimidating concepts for people looking to get into 3D character animation. So much so that I'm sure it scares some people away from even approaching the subject at all. In this week's video I'm going to show you an awesome website called Mixamo which comes free with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription that allows you to easily rig and animate a character when setting up your character. You want to set that character up in a T-pose. This is just kind of standard practice for traditional character modelers and riggers. Basically you just set up the T-pose with the arms kind of spread out to the sides so you can see what's going on there and this just makes it way easier to rig whether you're rigging yourself or you're using Mixamo. Another thing you want to make sure of is that your feet are right on the ground plane as well. So once you have your character in a T-pose and on the ground plane we need to set up this so we can save it as a Mixamo compatible file format. Now Mixamo likes fbxs or objs and I prefer to use fbxs because it stores more information than obj. Now one important part about importing an fbx which you can do just by going to file export, and going to fbx, is how it handles materials. Now if you built a character that was using the default color shader here it's actually not going to come through. That's why I loaded up simple texture files that are just simple colors and I saved them all in a tex folder, you can see right here that's the standard folder format for Cinema 4D textures. So you can see all of these different colors just simple jpgs just simple colors and loaded them up in the color channel because the color in the color channel, right here, if you did not have this texture this is going to get blown out and your character's just going to show up as completely flat white so it's going to be really hard to see the details on your character. So once you do that and convert all of your color shader based materials to image based textures, you're all set for export, so what we're going to do is go ahead and go to export and go to fbx now there's a couple of settings we need to do here. Let me just go ahead and hit save and I'll replace my other file, there's a few very important settings here, number one being that Mixamo tends to like older formats of fbx so I'm going to choose 7.4 which is the 2014 version. Another thing I'm going to need to do is if you have subdivision surfaces you can check that on. Another important thing is making sure that textures and materials and embed textures is checked on and that's basically it, so once we have that I'm going to save that out and let's go ahead and hop into Mixamo. So here we are and you can see that I already tried a character and this is what your character will look like if you did not do that step of replacing your color shader base materials with image based textures. You can see how it's very hard to make out what is going on here. Let's go ahead and we're going to click on the upload character and you can even see some further instructions on how to prepare your model and all that good stuff, but you can see the file formats here fbx, obj so let's just go ahead and grab our fbx file that we just made. So I'll just click on that and you can see that it automatically created this new folder with all of our textures that will be embedded in our fbx, and let me just click open and now we'll have the character upload to the Mixamo website and have it do its processing here, and here we go so you can see because I have those image based textures they all translated through here, albeit a little bit dark here because there's no lightning other than the default lighting. But if you didn't have your character facing front you would then use all of these tools to be able to reconfigure the positioning and rotation of your character so everything looks good. I'm just going to hit next and here is where we place some markers on our model so it can help Mixamo auto-rig this character. So I'm just going to click and drag to drop the chin here where the chin on my character is, and then we'll position this for the wrists. Position the elbow markers. Position the knees, and then position the groin region so right about there, and another important thing is the skeleton level of detail, you can have the standard skeleton, we're just going to do oven mitt hands, and once we have that all set up I'll hit next and this is where Mixamo does its behind the scenes magic and it can take up to a couple minutes as you can see. But we'll just let Mixamo do its thing and we'll come right back. Alright once the auto-rigging algorithm is all set up you get this little preview of your little character kind of sitting there. We can zoom in here, and see how this looks. But basically this auto movement that's applied is just to see if everything looks correct. So if anything looks off you can always go back and readjust those markers that we had set up. But I think this is looking pretty close to how we want. Maybe the chin's a little off 'cause his mouth's just drooping a little bit but let's just go ahead and do next and let's just say hit next and now you'll see your little character in this little view, and here's where you can start applying animations. So you can have a jumping animation. So you can see how that looks. We can have Samba dancing, really crazy stuff and we have all these different options. How much energy is in there, the stance, the overdrive basically how fast this guy, how fast your character is going to dance and do its movement. Also the character arm space gives a nice little buffer so you don't have any body intersection or anything like that. You know, this is a little bit rough, I can definitely adjust some of the little markers and stuff like that. To fix what's going on with his chin and all that stuff. But this is looking pretty good, let's just do, we can even look for say just an idle pose, and just kind of place that right about there. So he's just kind of sitting there or just have the character just kind of stand and have some subtle movement. So once you have whatever kind of movement you want or you could even just export out a T-pose that would be already rigged, something like that, and you can just download that and then animate it on your own if you wanted to. So we can just do that, so I'm just going to download the character and fbx format, all this good stuff, we're all looking good and we're just going to download and then we can hop back into Cinema 4D and navigate to our downloaded fbx file. So we got the T-pose let's just open that up click okay and there is our fully rigged character, it's not animated because the T-pose does not come with animation but if we wanted to download an fbx with the animation all that mocap data we could totally import that as well. But there is how we can get a super simple automatically rigged character and even one with animation applied as well. We can just go and maybe get this idle animation and download that as well. So we'll just have this download just so I can show a pose that has animation applied to it. Jump back into Cinema 4D and let's open this idle.fbx pose and here we go, there it is. A fully rigged and animated character with Mixamo doing all the heavy work. Now it's pretty great that even if we upload this little cartoony character like this with exaggerated proportions and stuff like that. Mixamo still does a pretty good job. Now if you did want to use a T-pose and animate and set up controllers all by yourself. There's a really handy script you can buy called RH Character Tools now RH Character Tools is really cool it allows you to set up all your controllers automatically based off of a Mixamo character rig. So you don't have to do all the manual processing of setting up all of your hands, feet, legs all that good stuff all of those controllers, does it all for you. So be sure to check that out. So hopefully that lets you see how incredible Mixamo is it does magic behind the scenes, and in a pinch you can now quickly and easily apply animation to a rigged character or at the very least have it be auto rigged for you to animate yourself in Cinema 4D. So hope you have fun making all of your characters move and groove using Mixamo, and I'll see you next week. and I'll see you next week. So you don't want to wait until next week So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? to learn something new? No problem, here are some other ways No problem, here are some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn Library, You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn Library, visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials. visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post Subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily Mo-Graph inspiration and keep up to date Mo-Graph inspiration and keep up to date on all my latest Mo-Graph creations on Instagram. on all my latest Mo-Graph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you here again next week. and I'll see you here again next week.