Adobe has purchased Mixamo (San Francisco, CA), maker of a 3D character pipeline aimed at game developers, including an automatic online rigging tool designed to quickly turn 3D meshes into standardized, fully rigged skeletons. Mixamo said its software and services will become part of Adobe's Creative Cloud. The move will expand the 3D animation capabilities of Photoshop, Adobe said, while simultaneously providing users with a library of stock 3D character models.
"Over the coming months, Adobe and Mixamo will work on integrating Mixamo products and services into Adobe's offerings," Mixamo said in a statement posted at its website. "During this period, new Mixamo purchases such as buying new plans, renewing existing plans or purchasing assets a la carte will not be available."
Mixamo's free services, including the Fuse 3D character creator and a limited number of auto-rig and animation downloads per user, will remain available. Mixamo said its current subscribers can continue to use the service at their current subscription level (upgrades are no longer available) at least until their plan's expiration date, and promised to extend all plans that expire before the end of the year to December 31, 2015. Before that date, presumably, we will know more about how Adobe plans to integrate Mixamo into its Creative Cloud offering.
The acquisition comes as Adobe takes a deeper dive into animation for Creative Cloud, starting with last month's announcement of Adobe Character Animator, which gives users a way to puppeteer 2D characters created in Photoshop or Illustrator by using a webcam with face-tracking tools, as well as mouse, keyboard, and programmed behaviors, to control their on-screen actions. At the same time, Adobe has been focusing on adding new 3D-compositing and 3D-printing features to Photoshop.
"We plan to integrate Mixamo's technology into Photoshop CC to empower designers to create, customize, manipulate, rig and animate 3D content, as well as to take advantage of tens of thousands of high-quality turnkey 3D models, starting with stock characters that can be easily pulled into projects," wrote Winston Hendrickson, Adobe's VP of digital imaging products, in a blog posting at Adobe's website. "We see a marriage of high-quality content and powerful tools geared toward graphic designers that make working with 3D morre accessible than ever before. Mixamo helps us address these market demands and the current challenges of working with 3D."
Currently, Mixamo characters can be imported into Photoshop using the New 3D Layer from File option, which allows users to select an animated .dae file for import. Photoshop's Move tool orients that 3D layer in relation to the Photoshop backdrop, including moving, rotating and scaling. Each 3D layer in Photoshop is illuminated by a default light that can be rotated around the scene to find the best match for the environment, and adjustment layers and layer masks can be used to further finesse the image. Using the Photoshop Timeline, layer properties can be animated over time. You can see a detailed workflow breakdown on Mixamo's site.
At SIGGRAPH last year, Mixamo demonstrated a system allowing a user to animate a 3D character in real time using a technology called Face Plus to transfer information about the user's facial expressions to the animated character.
