Quick Animations in Unreal Engine 5.3 Using Mixamo
Retarget Animations Quickly
One of the most daunting things about learning game development can be how to handle animations. In 2021 I wrote Motion Capture DIY explaining how to use old Microsoft Kinect hardware to create motion-captured animations without expensive mocap suits. Since then newer methods of homebrew mocap have come along that allow the use of smartphones and other lidar cameras to handle motion capture. However, sometimes there is no time for motion capture and you need to locate some free animations and get them up and running as fast as possible. So today we will look at how Mixamo combined with Unreal Engine to achieve this. In the past, you might have tried a few hacky workarounds to get the animation into unreal and then manually retarget the animation using the skeleton. However, we will use the Mixamo Converter (free) tool from Terribillis Studio to quickly achieve this task.
Getting Started
To get started you will first need to do a little preparation. Of course, you will need Unreal Engine, this guide is for UE 5.0+ (specifically UE5.3). You will also need to create a Mixamo account. Finally, you will need to get Mixamo Converter.