44. MIXAMO CHALLENGES

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Despite the fact that these animations that I sourced from Mixamo were so much better than any animation I could create, there were still several challenges that I now faced.

The first challenge was finding the animation that fit what I needed. There are only a limited set of animations that Mixamo has available. If there is not something that fits my animatic plan, or ideas that I wanted, well then what could I do?

I could either make the animation myself, but that would probably reveal a big clash between my own style of animation and the high quality Mixamo animations. (In fact, in a couple of places, I think it is a bit too clear where these contrasts happen in the film.)

Another solution that I exercised more frequently is to mix different Mixamo animations into one that fit what I needed.



This is the case with the guitar-playing animation. The Mixamo solution has the musician standing while playing guitar, but I clearly wanted sitting. So I found a nice sitting animation for the lower part of Zann's body, and used the guitar-playing animation for the upper part of his body. 

Yet another solution to this challenge would be to simply abandon the shot that I wanted.

The second challenge that Mixamo introduced was making the animation fit within the sets that I had already designed. The most obvious examples of this were walking up and down the stairs. The steps that Mixamo prescribed ended up different from the size of the steps that I originally designed. I figured that having good animation was more important than the size of my stairs, so for that scene, I remade the staircase so that it would better fit the steps of characters took in the animation.

 

The third challenge of using Mixamo animation was that it might not have fit within the confines of my original animatic. In that case, it was very easy for me to decide that my shots would be altered in order to make the animation fit the idea better. This might entail having to move the camera in different ways, but that seemed a minor sacrifice to get nice looking animation.



My original screenplay had these shots all combined as one long camera-shot. However, because I couldn't figure out how to best combine all of the animations required to get this to work, I decided to simply cut it into a couple of shots. This was easier since part of my original screenplay did include the camera leaving her out of the shot for a moment. During this moment, it was easy to incorporate a new animation for the student (and during that last animation for the scene, I did have to combine two Mixamo animations in order to get her to the door). 


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