if you followed the Making YOU a Third-Person Avatar in Unreal guide you will have exported from the Blender step a character.
Note: This workflow will work work for almost any custom character -as long as they are bipedal – they dont even need to be rigged as Mixamo has an auto rigger. They will need to be in .fbx or .obj format – .glb wont work. If you have a custom character from 3D software like Blender that isnt rigged see this.
1. Jump over to Mixamo and sign up. It’s Adobe, webased and free & you don’t need Adobe CC.
2. It has a Character and an Animation tabs. We are concerned now with the Animations tab.
Click the Upload Character Button and choose YourCharacterAvatar (that was exported from Blender if you followed the MAKING YOU into a Third-Person Avatar in Unreal)
3. If everything goes well you should see a window like this with your character. Click Next
4. Back in the main window choose animations from the grid on the left which will preview them on your character, and it is possible to trim & tweak them if necessary. Finally click DOWNLOAD
6. In the next window, keep the defaults, but change Skin to Without Skin – because we already have the character mesh so we want just the animaiton.
7. Over in Unreal if you followed the guide you will already have imported YourCharacterAvatar. Open the Content Drawer and make a folder for animations, then click the Import button. In the FBX Import Options dialogue that pops up, leave everything at defaults except for Skeleton….
8. …Select YourCharacterAvatar_Skeleton from the Skeleton drop down.
Because the same skeleton was used to export the animations from Mixamo, there will be a match.
Click Import All. You can import animations at once, however just do one to start with to test.
9. In the Content Browser you will see you imported animations.
10. Drag and drop them into the 3D viewport, then press play to preview. This is the simplest way to see mocap animations in Play mode, they just play and loop.
