Godot 4 - Easy Animation Retargeting In Minutes

The workflow, start to finish, passing a Mixamo animation between models. I'll explain the concepts behind what you're doing so you can make your own universally compatible animations to pass between your models.
I take some liberties in the explanation, but my intent is to make it easier to understand, so you can troubleshoot issues that come up on your own, and can more easily identify where you may have gone wrong.
Godot 4.1 Stable
Blender 3.6.2

[@Trench_762]

F in chat to the people who didn't find this

[@Mushele]

To people who make their own animations/rigs - You can just save your animations to seperate file, then in import settings load that file as animation library which can be loaded in animation player, that way you have 100% control over the process instead of hoping for good results :3

[@Skiggles]

If you are not seeing any animations playing on model B, trying saving the animation file from model A with a .tres extension. For some reason in Godot 4.22, using a .res extension caused the imported animations to not use the generic bonemap names. In other words, the imported animations exported from model A were using the actual bone names from the armature of model A instead of the names from the bonemap. I will submit a bug report to the Godot devs.

[@jasonea95]

Great tutorial, I tried this out and the only hiccup I had was that on the models I used, one of the models imported having the toes at the bottom green dots instead of the balls of the feet. Once I figured that out and changed them to the correct bones, everything imported without a hitch! So just to add if the dots are green it doesn't necessarily mean that everything automatically mapped correctly.

[@mch43856]

awesome ty!

[@GrixM]

Awesome tutorial, but I have one problem. When importing the animation into Godot, the character is fixed in place when he shouldn't be. The animation plays, but for example if he is supposed to take some steps forward, he moonwalks in place rather than doing actually moving forward with his steps. It's like the root armature node is missing a position animation track. I don't think the animation is meant to do this, because in Blender it plays perfectly (I even re-imported the exported glb animation into Blender to verify that it still plays well). Any ideas?

[@sonnyobrien]

why did you not just retarget in blender... why did you bother to go through this process of having two imported skeletons/character models.

[@vast634]

You can also manually edit the bones map (saved to file) in a Text editor, if you need to quickly adjust the names or find bugs. Its just a text file that maps godot bone names to model bone names.

[@FileTh1rt3en]

Hey I watched a few of your other videos and I've run into some issues with this workflow. I'm pretty sure I understand most of it but the animations I want to use are not from Mixamo, they are ones that I've purchased and unfortunately the root pose of the animations is not t-pose or a-pose and it's causing horrible results. I tried using a few things in Blender to remedy this but was unable to get the root pose to be a-pose or t-pose, without basically manually positioning bones and since that's a ton of work I haven't tried it. I did try the Fix Silhouette stuff in Godot for the animation and also the model but found I don't need it for the model. The animation mostly works with the fix in place but it looks incredibly janky and the toes move really strangely. The animation and model combination work perfectly in Unity and I was hoping to figure this out because of the Unity Exodus... Any tips would be appreciated.

[@jaimimcentire99]

From a high level view, it's seems like it's basically a clone of Mecanim from Unity. Awesome job. Can't wait to check it out. Thanks for the video!

[@victorvatalakis5118]

This is like the 7th retargeting / add animation video I watched.. and during all the others I was thinking "really? all this workflow just to retarget? how inefficient and prone to error, surely there's a better way"

[@MoondreamGaming]

I jut had the revelation of my life and solved 600% of my problems in8 minutes. amazing, a living legend.

[@yvanvan3729]

Thank you for this great tutorial and these clear explanations. This will save many people a lot of work.

[@jeroenh2470]

Finally, a video that explains this topic🙏

[@Keanine]

Thank you for this tutorial, I'm used to Unity's mecanim system so this is pretty similar. And especially thank you for explaining everything clearly too, I'm doing some runtime model imports so understanding the underlying mechanics of each action you did is very important for me to mould it into something that works for my situation

[@almirpask]

Thanks a lot!

[@firerunnew]

Спасибо, помогли наконец-то в этом разобраться!

[@Khytau]

Thanks!

[@nyx3m]

Brooooo you are so underrated

[@AshironDerigarStudios]

ive got a suggestion for the 3d action adventure kit, 3d metroid prime style maps i have some ideas and theories on how to do it but the one issue ive had is the im not sure how to get the separate map working correctly. It just sounds like a great feature to add