📦 Exporting FBX

Nothing is baked while your animation processes — mimem builds the FBX when you ask for it. Every option is chosen at the moment you download, not frozen when you hit record. Change your mind about root motion a week later and you just export again.

Where to export

Open a processed animation from the Animations tab. The 3D viewer’s sidebar has an Export section — the one place FBX files leave mimem.

What gets exported

The export matches what the viewport shows:

Multi-actor takes export one actor at a time: select the actor, export, then select the next.

On your own character

Load a character in the viewer’s Retarget section and the export round-trips your own skeleton — same bones, same names, ready to drop onto the character it came from. There is no format to pick, because there is nothing to pick: the skeleton is yours.

If you applied an IK solve, that is what gets baked. Otherwise you get the FK retarget, which is what the viewport was already showing you. See Retarget to your own character.

On the mimem skeleton

With no character loaded, the take is exported on one of mimem’s two built-in rigs, and the Format select chooses which:

• Unity — a Unity-compatible skeleton, ready to set as a Humanoid rig on import.
• Unreal — an Unreal-compatible skeleton, which keeps in-engine retargeting to Manny or Quinn simple.

Both are standard FBX and open just as well in Blender, Maya, MotionBuilder, Cascadeur or 3ds Max — the choice only decides which skeleton the animation sits on, so pick the one matching where the clip is going.

Insert T-pose

Adds the rest pose as the first frame of the clip.

On by default, because most tools are happier with it. Several build their rig from the first frame of the FBX and expect a T-pose there — Cascadeur’s Quick Rigging tool is the common case — and Unreal uses it to align skeletons when retargeting.

Turn it off when you want the clip to start on the performance itself: the T-pose is a real frame at the head of the animation, so otherwise you will trim it later.

Root motion

Controls where the character’s travel through the scene is stored.

• On — translation lives on the armature, so the whole rig moves through the scene.
• Off — translation is applied to the hip bone instead, and the armature stays at the origin.

Which one you want depends on the target. Cascadeur handles armature-level root motion natively, so keep it on for that workflow. The Blender retargeting guide wants it off, so that root motion drives the hip bone and the add-on can constrain it.

Defaults

Settings → FBX export defaults pre-fills Insert t-pose at keyframe 0 and root motion for every export. They are only defaults — you can still change them per download.

Batch export

Select several animations in the Animations list, or use a folder’s actions, and choose Export FBX. Format, T-pose and root motion apply to the whole run, each actor becomes its own FBX, and everything arrives as a single zip. Up to 500 animations at a time.

Batch export always exports the source animation on the built-in rig. Retargeted exports are done one take at a time, in the viewer.

Your export allowance

Your plan includes a number of FBX exports. The allowance is counted per animation, not per file. The first export of an animation spends one; everything after that is free — the other format, another actor, a retargeted version, or simply downloading it again later.

Re-downloading

History → FBX exports lists everything already exported from the take you are viewing. Re-downloading from there costs nothing and runs nothing — the file exists, it is handed straight back.

Animations processed before on-demand export

Older animations were processed when the FBX was still baked up front. For those, the Export section offers Download FBX with a format choice and nothing else — no T-pose or root motion options, and no retargeting, because those are built from data the old pipeline did not keep.

In batch export they are listed as Processed before on-demand export — relaunch to export. Relaunching processing on the animation moves it onto the current pipeline.

To go further

• Retarget to your own character — put the take on your own rig before exporting it.
• Import into Unreal Engine and Unity — what to do with the file once you have it.
• Import into Cascadeur — the two-pass import, and why it wants a T-pose.
• Advanced parameters — smoothing and frame rate, set when the animation is processed.