A well known actor and theorist, Sandy Meisner, once said that "acting is the ability to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances." He was of course referring to theatre in it's direct sense, but Meisner's words are an unexpectedly appropriate definition for CG character "acting" as well.

Character animation is about timing - it's about poses, expressions, and body mechanics. It's about exaggerated moments. It's about conveying emotion in a completely constructed and rendered environment - with no real pain, love, excitement, or any other truthful fundamental emotional input or output. It's about creating physics in a non-physical world. It's acting.

In film, the implications of character animation are as obvious as they are crucial. In gaming, character animation encourages empathy from the player for the character - increasing engagement and interest.

The connection between the conveyance of meaning through your character's motion and it's ultimate perception by your audience, is a finely tuned dialogue. If your timing is too fast, the audience might miss the punch - too slow and you lose their interest. Whether your character be animal, fantasy, human-like, or some twisted combination of all three - it must relay action in a way that your audience can relate to. There are hundreds of articles and studies about the elements of anthropomorphism in character animation - a technique that ultimately maximizes the ability for an audience to perceive and understand an animated character by it's relationship to human "reality."

If all that is true, then what better technique for physical communication than to root your character animation in reality itself? The introduction of motion capture created an opportunity for animators to access real-life motion data for a head-start on what would otherwise be tedious keyframing. But, unless you have access to an in-house capture studio and clean up staff, mocap data often requires just as much work to use as it does to keyframe. There is cleaning, looping, and the always tedious task of retargeting.

While technology and artistic talent are at an all time high, production schedules are tightening across the board to increase profit. Gamers and film audiences expect to be "wow-ed" time and time again.

With these quality expectations and tight schedules, 3D animators are turning to Mixamo more and more to provide the base layer of motion for hard-to-reproduce physics such as weight transfer, foot plant, and timing. Mixamo's built-in retargeting makes pipeline import negligible and keyframe reduction leaves motion data palatable for even the most hardcore keyframe purists. Real-time physical and emotional customization means you can tweak your motion (and emotion) right off-the-bat, before merging back into your pipeline. Production companies and developers such as nDreams, GamersFirst, and JumpCore are all reporting production cycles at a fraction of their historical time by using Mixamo to "up the anty" on character animation - giving their characters the ability to live "truthfully" in their imaginary circumstances regardless of constraint or pressure.

Cramming high-quality artistic character animation into film and game budgets can often be a compromising task…as much as art and money are always at war. But the casualties can be reduced.

Give your walk cycles a running start - with Mixamo you can set the stage for your talent as an animator to give life to a character - to be a director, not just a "poser."