The Ohio State University computing centre motion capture lab has a range of common male and female motions in various formats.has around 50 free mocap animations in either BIP, BVH, or FBX format.Must be downloaded individually through an annoyingly ad-laden site, and despite being described as “free”, it’s unclear what the licence for use of these files is. has ~400 everyday/sports animations in BIP format.Rather annoyingly, though, the rigs used in the FBX downloads don’t appear to be compatible with Unity’s MecAnim system, so I had to download either the BIP or BVH format and convert them instead (details below).

Animations are often recorded by different actors, and in various file formats (FBX, BIP, C3D, BVH). Japanese site, which claims to be “ the world biggest state of the art motion capture library on the earth” has several hundred free animations in various categories licenced under a CC Attribution licence, together with some ludicrously expensive “premium” animations… (such as this animation pack, which costs $82,200!!!).

Fortunately, there are several repackaged versions, such as this version in more common BioVision Hierarchy (BVH) format. The original raw data is captured as ASF/AMC format, which I have no idea how to use. The Carnegie-Mellon Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database has a large range of motions which can be copied, modified, or redistributed without permission.However, they’re not cheap, so I sought out some free alternatives:

If you want high-quality ready-to-use character animations for Unity, then Mixamo seems the de facto place to go. I encountered a fair number of issues along the way, so here’s a summary of my what I learned: and watch the character do those actions in a life-like way is very appealing, compared to laboriously editing sprite sheets or tweaking animation keyframes.įriends who know more about animation than me point out that motion capture is a tool designed to help animators, rather than a tool designed to replace animators, but for my prototypes I’d be quite happy to use fairly raw motion-captured animations – they’d certainly be better than anything I could draw. Seeing as I’m neither an artist or an animator, the thought of simply being able to apply a data file of “walking”, “jumping”, “shooting” etc. I mentioned in my last blog post that I’d experimented with using motion capture data as a way to quickly animate characters for a game jam in Unity.

Multiple animation fbx unity