I’m not sure what you mean by “splitting” the armature, and “biped” is a very large group of possible armatures. It’s not too hard to rig an armature from scratch in Blender, but organizing hundreds of animations (armature actions) is not trivial, and it would surprise me if a website converter could do something that general robustly.
On a totally unrelated note, I found this website with a thousand free PBR materials: https://cc0textures.com/
An armature is a set of bones. How many bones / how to divide the armature up is up to the artist usually. A biped is a type of armature with two legs, etc - many 3d modelling packages can do things automatically with ‘bipedal armatures’ if the bones are layed out properly. Let me know if that makes sense at all. For example - footstep / walk tools are very common in tools like Maya/Max/etc, but the biped needs to be setup properly.
I did a test with Mixamo / Blender / Panda and it was pretty impressive. I was able to get an animated mesh into Panda, and every animation from Mixamo did work (that I tried.) here’s the output:
So it does indeed work for a properly rigged mesh - but, when I uploaded a ‘custom’ mesh to the site, it /almost/ worked, Mixamo auto-rigged the entire model, but some vertices in the feet were missed. So I know it’s possible - just haven’t had time to read up on how to get ‘custom’ meshes fully compatible. My assumption is that I need to fiddle the foot bones, but haven’t confirmed, yet.
It would be great to be able to tap into all those free animations, some are very high quality.
this is great!
If you can post information (a graph, picture, etc) regarding the armature standards I’d need to meet, I would probably upload an armature here that somebody could use. But, if the armature needs to be provided, why couldn’t somebody just download all the prebuilt “biped animations” they already have in .blend format? Sorry if this sounds a little dense.
My process is to 1. build the armature 2. bind a mesh to it 3. animate the whole thing
I do wonder what kind of “tricks” are involved in this website converter process that could lead to weird bugs and bone scaling issues. I totally understand why a team or a particular person might like these prebuilt animations, but it’s not really something I’m interested in for my own work. I’d rather not scale nodes.
And sorry to be a little nitpicky, but the animation you have shown does not appear seamless. It would be better to have a fluid motion for an effective advertisement of a website converter.
The lanky bald guy with a beer belly in a wet suit I have recently made, in Blender:
You can see the animation dope sheet there.
The Gifs don’t do justice, much nicer and smoother in real-time.
Most of the 26,000 or so animations seemed to work in Panda that I tried, at random. Note that some of these are created using pretty expensive mocap hardware, so quality is high. Although not all are great, there’s a mix.
Not all anims work on all of their meshes, some have minor deformation.
Great questions. No idea, my extent of Mixamo experience is 1) Export FBX 2) Import to Blender 3) Export to Panda
I have uploaded a custom mesh - like I said previous it almost worked. Got very close. Not sure what is needed beyond that. (Haven’t spent much time at this).
But I really think a process for using all these Professional anims in Panda is a very cool thing.
I’ve given the question of Mixamo and the PAnDA model a little more thought. I think that I’m not going to aim to support Mixamo, although nor do I intend to work against such support.
Simply put, I’m making this model in spare time, and there’s a fair bit of work yet to be done as it is–I haven’t even started on normal-mapping, let alone the bit of sculpting that I intend, or a gloss-map, or a glow-map!
So I rather don’t want to add to my workload by making sure that the armature conforms to Mixamo’s requirements.
Totally reasonable.
I’ll get to this soon myself at some point, when the samples need a bit more advanced animation logic. Ideally after I figure it out I’ll provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to make it work, as I think it’ll be a major boon for Panda users to be able to tap into these more easily.
I did a bit more research, it looks like my original assumption might have been wrong almost completely. I don’t think Mixamo uses the armature from custom meshes that are uploaded, but actually regenerates them directly from the mesh and UI at upload! Which is pretty insane, that it might be able to auto rig meshes like that. There were some notes about putting the model in T pose at upload and centering the mesh at 0,0,0, and ensuring feet were touching ground at 0. That may have been why my custom mesh didn’t work. Some trial and error and I think I can work the last few kinks out here. I’ll definitely post a tutorial when I get there.
This seems to have good info on the process:
Indeed, impressive tech! This makes quite a lot more sense – taking a mesh with an intricately laid out armature that fits their analysis tools.
I think I understand what you’re implying with regard to model positioning, but if we centered the mesh at (0, 0, 0), the feet would be below the ground.
Yeah, that seems like quite a lot of work, and I’m 99% sure it does not allow full control over character self-clipping. But, as an automation procedure, cool! Good luck with that if you are committed to the task.
Per the tutorial video it looks like you might not need an armature at all, just a mesh. A couple minutes in they show a little gizmo to help their tool auto-rig. If it’s the case it should be a huge time-saver. Take any humanoid model, let their tool do the anim work.
(I need to look closer at their licensing… just to make sure time invested here is really justified for Panda sample dev purposes). But I’ve seen a few non-panda community projects use their stuff recently, which piqued my interest.
Maybe it can do rigging for humanoid characters only, automatically. I admittedly watched the tutorial without sound, so I just saw the large bone list and assumed. 
Indeed, this seems very cool. And already partially working well with Panda, so I think this could be a great helper for Panda users. I’ll spend a bit more time on this, and publish some findings here once I can get some custom meshes to work reliably.
