Hey guys, this is my first post here so hoping I’ll stay on this site for quite some time.
I’m a uni student researching Technical Art and one of things I came across recently was the automatic rigging tools like Mixamo.
It’s not a great piece of software since it’s fairly limited, but I was wondering if anyone uses this software seriously or know anyone or companies who use this instead of taking on a Technical Artist? I’m just really interested what the demographic is of people who would prefer to use auto-rigging software as opposed to getting an actual person to do it.
I evaluated mixamo for our studio.
I think It might be useful for prototype mesh and animation assets that get swapped out in the future with “real” assets, or a shortcut for an indie studio.
We decided against it, Mainly because its output was not easily convertible to our legacy rigs which used a different bone orientation.
I’m also not sure the skin weight results were better than the Max defaults.
I’ll assume that you’re focusing mainly on auto riggers in 3ds Max because you mentioned the LH | Auto Rig. I downloaded the demo character rigged with the tool and I thought it was ok, but I would suggest looking into Rune Spaan’s SuperSimple auto rigger, one big advantage is that it’s open source so you can look at the code(!), it is restricted to bipedal characters at the moment.
While working at House of Cool studios, we Evaluated and used Mixamo.
We used Mixamo for background characters such as crowds, walking, cheering and many more. I do not think any studio could really use Mixamo unless they have a tech artist in house. I was Character/Pipeline TD there and had my hands full writing re-targeting tools to apply the Mixamo animation back onto our rigs which were built with a proprietary auto rigging system.
We did not use any of their auto skinned meshes as they were rubbish! I was getting better results by quickly exporting skinned character into max and spending 10 to 15 min skinning them and them importing them back in maya.
As far as Auto Rigs go, I have evaluated all the auto rigs mentioned here as well as many others. Our studio heads always thought they could save time and money by finding the holy grail of auto rigs and in the end we always ended up writing our own that met our pipeline needs and animator needs. I am currently writing my third auto rigging system , the first to fully support non humanoid characters. I would not trade the headache the comes with creating my own system for anything else as in the end it is the best way imho.