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Mixamo

Mixamo Inc.
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryInteractive entertainment
Founded2008; 16 years ago (2008)
Founder
  • Stefano Corazza
  • Nazim Kareemi
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
United States
Number of employees
20
ParentAdobe Inc.
Websitewww.mixamo.com

Mixamo Inc. (/ˈmɪksəmoʊ/) is a 3D computer graphics technology company. Based in San Francisco, the company develops and sells web-based services for 3D character animation. Mixamo's technologies use machine learning methods to automate the steps of the character animation process, including 3D modeling to rigging and 3D animation.

Mixamo is spun-off of Stanford University and has raised over $11 million from investors Granite Ventures, Keynote Ventures, Stanford University and AMD Ventures.[1] Mixamo was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2015.[2]

History

Mixamo was founded in 2008 by Stefano Corazza and Nazim Kareemi as a spin-off of Stanford University's Biomotion Lab,[1][3] and started out as a cloud-based service offering animations and automatic character rigging.[4] It launched its first online animation service in 2009. In 2010, Mixamo worked with Evolver to provide characters to customers.[4] Later Autodesk acquired Evolver and made it proprietary, but Mixamo had already begun work on its own character creation service.[4]

Mixamo released its automatic rigging service in 2011. That was followed by the launch of its real-time facial animation product, Face Plus, in 2013,[5] and the official launch of its Fuse 3D character creator software in March 2014.[6] In August 2014, Mixamo launched a new pricing structure.[7]

Mixamo was acquired by Adobe Systems on 1 June 2015.[2]

Fuse

Models created with Fuse.

In March 2014, Mixamo officially launched Fuse Character Creator at Game Developers Conference.[6] Fuse stems out of the research done by Siddhartha Chaudhuri[8] which originated within Vladlen Koltun's research group at Stanford and Substance technology from Allegorithmic.[9] An early version of the service had been released in November 2013.[10]

It allows users to create a 3D character by assembling customizable body parts, clothing and textures together.[11] Those characters can then be exported into other 3D model software packages or game engine.[11]

In March 2014, Mixamo launched Fuse 1.0 on Steam with the ability of importing and integrating user generated content in the character creation system.[12] Fuse was updated to allow the importation and editing of character models generated by Microsoft's Kinect 2.0 in August of that year.[13]

Development of Fuse was discontinued in September 2019. On 13 September 2020, the program was removed from the Adobe Creative Cloud and is no longer available for download from Adobe.[14] Version 1.3 is still available for download on the Steam Marketplace.[15]

Rigging service

This service has been discontinued for keeping custom 3D models and models uploaded via fuse CC on Adobe's servers. You can still upload custom 3D models to the online auto rigging service and rig them, but they won't be kept. Mixamo also provides an online, automatic model rigging service known as the Auto-Rigger, which was the industry's first online rigging service. The AutoRigger applies machine learning to understand where the limbs of a 3D model are and to insert a "skeleton", or rig, into the 3D model as well as calculating the skinning weights. The service can take up to 2 minutes.[16]

3D Character Animation

Mixamo's online services include an animation store featuring downloadable 3D models and animation sequences. The animations were created at Mixamo using motion capture and cleaned up by key frame animators. All its animations work with characters created in Fuse and/or rigged with Mixamo's AutoRigger.

Real-time facial animation

Screenshot from "Unplugged": real-time facial animation from single camera and blendshape animation running in Unity game engine.

August 2013, Mixamo released Face Plus, a game development tool that allows users to record facial animation data of themselves using a standard webcam and apply the animation to a character inside the Unity game engine in real-time.[5][17] Face Plus was briefly included in the keynote presentation at the Unite conference in Vancouver. The technology was developed in collaboration with AMD.[11] and uses GPU acceleration.[17]

The animated short "Unplugged" was created using Face Plus technology and as of April 2014 has won several awards.[18]

Face Plus has been discontinued and according to a September 2017 Adobe Forum post by Adobe staff JMathews, no further work on the product was being contemplated at that time.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ a b Dean Takahashi (7 November 2013). "Mixamo debuts Fuse character creation tool on Steam using Valve's Team Fortress 2 characters". Venture Beat. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  2. ^ a b "Unlocking The Power of 3D for The Creative Community – Adobe Acquires Mixamo « Adobe Creative Cloud". blogs.adobe.com. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  3. ^ Kim-Mai Cutler (23 July 2014). "Mixamo Is Building A Platform For Game Developers To Create And Animate 3D Characters". Tech Crunch. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  4. ^ a b c Kathleen Maher (21 May 2014). "Evolving Characters". Computer Graphics World. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  5. ^ a b Rachelle Dragani (29 August 2013). "Face Plus Gives Digital Characters Heart and Soul". TechNews World. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  6. ^ a b Craig Chapple (12 March 2014). "Mixamo launching Fuse 1.0". Develop Online. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  7. ^ "Mixamo Offers New Pricing Structure". Computer Graphics World. 20 August 2014. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  8. ^ Siddhartha Chaudhuri
  9. ^ Shane McGlaun (8 November 2013). "Mixamo Fuse universal expendable 3-D character creator launches on Steam". SlashGear. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
  10. ^ Kris Ligman (8 November 2013). "Fuse adds easy character creation to Steam". Gamasutra. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  11. ^ a b c Kathleen Maher (12 March 2014). "Mixamo builds out to end to end products, adds upgrade in time for GDC". GraphicSpeak. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  12. ^ William Usher (30 March 2014). "Mixamo Releases Fuse, Character Creation Tool on Steam". Cinema Blend. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  13. ^ Alex Wawro (7 August 2014). "Mixamo's Fuse makes modeling people easier with Kinect v2 support". Gamasutra. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  14. ^ "An Update on Adobe Fuse as Adobe Moves to the Future of 3D & AR Development". Adobe Blog. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  15. ^ "Fuse on Steam".
  16. ^ "Digging into rigging: Mixamo's character service explored". MCV. Retrieved 30 January 2018.
  17. ^ a b "Generate realistic Animation using Mixamo's Face plus". TropicalPost. 6 September 2013. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  18. ^ "Winners November 2013 |".
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