Combine mixamo animations with own rig / animation possible?

Question

So I downloaded a bunch of mixamo animations and edited them in NLA Editor. I want to make small tweaks here and there and add them to the whole animation but it doesnt work. When I rig up my character and animate it, it "erases" the whole underlying animation from mixamo. The animations are all fbx files.

Do you know how to combine mixamo animations with own animations?

Answer 1

There is 3 way to mix mixamo animation in Blender

1. Same fbx mixamo blended in NLA editor, good approach is upload your char rig with mixamo then download several animation, in NLA use Blend in and Blend out
2. With your own rig, remap your bones from mixamo using this remap tools plugin Keemap-Blender-Rig-ReTargeting-Addon https://github.com/nkeeline/Keemap-Blender-Rig-ReTargeting-Addon the tutorial to use this can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG-VCMkVpxg
3. If you buy and use AutoRigPro they have own tools to remap your bones from mixamo to autorigpro rigged bones https://blendermarket.com/products/auto-rig-pro tutorial here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNCehuAEn_c

usually i use this to export to game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine

sometimes the animation from mixamo is not perfect, in some case you have to delete all keyframes from that bones then reanimate again manually in Blender

Answer 2

You have to keyframe the influence of IK (or other controls from your rig- for example, I have my hand and foot bones copy transforms from my respective hand and foot controllers) down to 0 for the Mixamo actions. Just go to every single Mixamo animation at the frame 0 and keyframe every custom influence/bone constraint to 0. You also have to do the reverse for your custom animations. This approach works perfectly for exporting animations to Unity. I don't know how you're going to be using NLA editor so I can't say if it's going to work for you.