Mixamo Launches Character Auto-Rigger Service

Character animation company Mixamo has launched a new service called the Mixamo Auto-Rigger, which allows developers to automatically create rigged characters to be animated in "less than a minute." The new service is available for mobile, console and PC game development, and is aimed at saving developers time and resources. Characters can be animated from a static mesh in a matter of minutes, and the service is "more than 10X cheaper than the cost of professional manual rigging." Mixamo also supplies a large online animations collection, allowing developers to apply a whole host of animations to their rigged characters in real-time. It works with both single and multiple overlapping/non-overlapping meshes. This new technology was brought about from Mixamo co-founder Stefano Corazza's work at Stanford University, where $500,000 was invested in Mixamo Series A led by Granite Ventures and Keynote Ventures. The Mixamo Auto-Rigger is available at an introductory rate of $89 for the first month, and developers interested in the technology can freely preview their 3D characters online at the Mixamo site. Earlier in the year, Mixamo revealed that it was to integrate its online animation service with Unity's Asset Store digital content marketplace, making Mixamo's animation database available immediately to Unity developers through a free plug-in.