Mesh 2 Motion is completely free online application for creating rigs and weighting/skinning of your characters. The app seems to be inspired by Mixamo and offers a similar workflow.
In a nutshell, the process of using Mesh2Motion is:
- upload your model (glb or fbx) into the app
- load a skeleton rig and align it to your character
- finalize the process which applies weights so that your character now deforms with the skeleton
- apply animations that the app provides to your newly rigged character
- export to e.g. Blender or another app
Yes, it sounds very similar to Mixamo.
However, in my humble opinion, the Mesh2Motion UX still needs work. Keep in mind that as I’m writing this, the app is in Alpha so we can expect improvements in the future.
What bothered me in the workflow is the skeleton alignment: while doing so in Mixamo is extremely simple, the same process in Mesh 2 Motion is a lot less intuitive. If I’m honest, I found it frustrating because the viewport is hard to navigate and aligning the bones was unintuitive. Hopefully this will be improved in future versions of the app.
On the positive side, Mesh2Motion provides skeletons for a Human, Quadruped, Bird and even a Dragon, unlike Mixamo which can only handle humanoid rigs.
On the animation side, it’s great to see new and original movements which are not from the highly overused Mixamo library.
Also worth mentioning: Mesh2Motion is not just free but Open Source.
