Mixamo alternative
Drop in a T-posed humanoid and one command fits a 21-joint skeleton to it and solves the skin weights. Retarget any of 2,500+ motion-capture takes onto it, previewing each one running on your own character before you commit. Then — unlike a rigging service — stay in the same tab and edit the keys, texture the character, light it and render it.
The skeleton is measured off your mesh, not scaled from a template: arm span, shoulder width, crotch, ankles and leg spacing are read from the geometry, then every joint is recentered onto its limb. On a Mixamo-rigged test character the fit lands within about 1.5% of body height of that character's own joints.
2,500+ clips from the CMU motion-capture corpus, searchable by category and previewed on your own character before you commit one. Skeletons are matched by their proportions rather than their bone names, so a rig named in nobody's convention still takes a clip.
The fit and the weight solve run on your own machine in WebGPU — your character is never uploaded to a server to be rigged. A free Mixos account opens Studio; there is no Adobe ID or paid seat standing between you and a skeleton.
A rigging service hands you an FBX and the conversation ends. Here the bones are ordinary scene objects: keyframe them, add IK controls and pose by dragging, layer a hand-keyed take over a retargeted one, then texture, light and path-trace the character in the same tab.
Why Mixos
Mixamo is genuinely good and genuinely free, and it is worth being straight about that before arguing with it. Upload a humanoid, place five markers, and it hands back a clean rig and a library of hand-cleaned, loop-ready animations that you can download as FBX at no cost, for commercial work, with no royalty. If all you need is a rigged character with a walk cycle on it, that is a very short path and this page is not going to pretend it isn't.
Two things about it have aged, though. It is a service rather than a tool, so everything it does happens on Adobe's servers behind an Adobe ID, and your character has to go up there to come back rigged. And it is a dead end by design: the FBX it returns is the last thing it does for you. Retiming a clip, blending two takes, fixing a joint that landed wrong, or doing anything to the character other than animating it, all happen somewhere else.
Mixos inverts both. The auto-rigger is code running on your own GPU — nothing is uploaded — and it measures your mesh rather than fitting it to a stock proportion: joint heights, arm span, shoulder width, crotch and ankles are read off the geometry, and the joints a silhouette cannot show are placed by human proportion and then snapped onto each limb's medial line. Because it is a tool and not a service, every joint it places is an ordinary scene object you can nudge before re-solving the weights.
The honest trade is the library. Mixamo's clips are curated and cleaned for game use; the 2,546 takes here come from the CMU motion-capture archive, which is research data — broader and stranger, with far more of it, but variable in quality and not authored to loop. You get a preview of each clip running on your own character before you commit it, which is the practical answer to that, but the two libraries are not the same kind of thing and picking a clip here takes more judgment.
The other honest trade is price, and it runs the other way from most of this page. Mixamo is free through the download. Here, rigging, retargeting, previewing, keyframing and rendering to the viewport are free on any account with no watermark and no trial clock — but taking the finished animation out as a GLB is on a paid plan. If a free FBX of a rigged character is the whole job, Mixamo does that and Mixos does not.
Not identically, and the difference is worth stating plainly. Mixamo is free all the way through the FBX download. Mixos is free to rig, retarget, preview, keyframe and render to the viewport, with no time limit and no watermark, but exporting the finished animated character as a GLB is on a paid plan. So you can rig a character, put a clip on it and judge the result before paying anything — you just cannot take the file out for free.
A free one, yes — Studio opens after a free sign-up. The rigging itself is code running in your browser on your own GPU: the fit and the skin-weight solve never upload your character, and rigging costs no credits. The same account saves the scene to the cloud so it opens on your other devices.
Yes — arms straight out to the sides, legs slightly apart, facing front or back. That is the same requirement Mixamo has, and for the same reason: a T-pose hands the rigger the topology for free, so the arms are known to run along one axis and the joints can be measured rather than guessed. An A-pose or an already-posed character will place the arm joints wrong.
Yes, and this is where it is genuinely stronger. Pass a group — body plus armor, hair and accessories — and the skeleton is measured from the largest mesh (so a hat cannot make the character read as taller) while every part is bound against one shared volume solve. Weights travel through the volume rather than across the triangle surface, so overlapping shells move together instead of tearing apart at the seams.
2,546 takes from the CMU Graphics Lab motion-capture database — walks, runs, jumps, dances, sports, climbing, everyday actions — searchable by category. It is research mocap rather than a curated game library, so it is broader and less tidy than Mixamo's set; you preview each clip running on your own character before committing it, which is how you tell in a couple of seconds whether a take is the one.
Yes. Import a rigged character as GLB or FBX and its skeleton decomposes into ordinary bones with its clips as editable tracks. Retargeting matches joints by the shape of the skeleton rather than by bone names, so rigs named in Mixamo's convention, Unity and VRM's, Blender's .L/.R style, or nobody's at all, all take clips from the library.
That is most of the point. A retargeted clip lands as ordinary keyframe tracks: retime it in the dopesheet, shape the in-betweens in the curve editor, mirror it, or layer a hand-keyed take on top. You can also add IK chains with hand, foot and knee controls and pose by dragging them, then bake the solve down to keys for export.
The scene as GLB, glTF or FBX with its animation, plus the geometry as OBJ or STL and its PBR map sets. A rigged character exports with its skeleton and skin weights in all three animated formats, so the mesh deforms in the file. FBX carries materials as a base color only, so export GLB as well when the textures matter. Export is the paid step; everything up to it is free.
Read next
Bones, skin weights, IK, and why auto-riggers want a T-pose.
What carries over to an engine, and what to bake first.
Key, retime and ease a move, step by step.
Keys, in-betweens, and the interpolation that joins them.
Keep exploring
Online 3D animation
3D animation on iPad
Blender alternative
Online 3D modeling
