Importing your own character

The Character tool is bring-your-own-model: attach a Mixamo-rigged GLB to the 65-bone control rig, then play any clip you author on that character. Your poses and keys stay on the Studio rig while the imported model follows its matched bones, so the clip format does not change. This article covers importing and its requirements.

Import a character#

Open the Char tab in the right sidebar, find the Character section, and switch it to its Import tab — the panel opens on the cast list by default and then remembers whichever tab you last used. Click Import character (.glb) (also available as a command in the palette) and choose a .glb file, or a single-file .gltf whose buffers and textures are embedded. External .bin files and separately linked textures are not imported, so GLB is the recommended format. On success, the model appears in the viewport, posed by the current rig.

You can switch what's shown at any time with the Imported and None buttons: None hides the mesh and shows only the skeleton; Imported shows your model again. Switching characters never touches your pose, keys, undo history, or clips — those stay on the Studio rig.

You can also bring a character in from the Asset Library: inserting a rigged library asset imports it as your character. A non-rigged model is rejected with a message, because it has no skeleton to drive.

How the skeleton is matched#

The Studio finds the Mixamo skeleton by bone name and connects every recognized bone to its corresponding control. It tolerates common naming variants produced by exporters:

• mixamorig:Hips and mixamorigHips
• numbered and underscore variants such as mixamorig1:Hips and mixamorig_Hips

The Character tool supports a 65-bone control rig, but your model does not need every optional bone. Bones that are present are matched by name; missing bones are skipped with a non-blocking warning. A rig without fingers, for example, can still import, but finger controls will not affect it. The Character panel summarizes how many bones were matched and skipped.

A character you build with the Character Creator is built on this same 65-bone rig and binds to all of it, so imported and generated characters share one clip library: anything that plays on one plays on the other, with no retargeting step.

Auto-scaling#

Mixamo exports come in wildly different units. The importer measures the model's rest Hips height and auto-scales it so that height is about 1.0 rig unit — centimeter-scale exports get scaled down by roughly ×0.01. The original scale is remembered and restored on export, so your exported GLB comes back at the size you brought it in.

Requirements and failure modes#

For an import to succeed:

• The file must carry a recognizable Mixamo skeleton. It needs a mixamorig:Hips bone in one of the accepted name variants and at least 16 recognized Mixamo bones in total. A missing or too-sparse skeleton is rejected with a clear error.
• Use .glb, or a single-file .gltf with embedded buffers and textures. Multi-file glTF packages are not supported by the file picker.
• The file must be under the 50 MB import cap, and within complexity limits (very large geometry, primitive, accessor, or animation-channel counts are rejected to keep the import safe).

Missing individual bones are a warning, not a failure, as long as the minimum skeleton requirements are met. Because the Character rig drives the animation, your model's own baked-in animations aren't used; it is posed by the clips you author or load in the Studio.

Where to go next#

• Exporting animations — export the imported character (at its original scale) with your clips embedded, or export the bare rig for retargeting.
• Posing & IK and keyframes & timeline — author the motion the imported character plays.