🎬 Import into Cascadeur
mimem gives you production-quality motion capture from ordinary video. Cascadeur gives you physics-based auto-posing and interpolation. Together, they make a fast pipeline: capture with mimem, polish or edit in Cascadeur, export a clean FBX for any DCC tool or game engine.
Preparing your mimem export
mimem bakes the FBX when you ask for it, so both settings below are chosen at export time rather than before processing — see Exporting FBX. Open your take, and in the viewer’s Export section:
- Leave “Insert T-pose” on (the default) — Cascadeur’s rigging tool expects a T-pose on the first frame
- Leave “Root motion” on (the default) — Cascadeur handles armature-level root motion natively
Press Export FBX and save the .fbx file.
Cascadeur imports the model and the animation in two separate passes, from the same mimem .fbx file: rig the model first, then apply the animation on top of the rig.
1. Import the model
Open Cascadeur and go to File → Import → Import Fbx/Dae.
In the FBX/DAE IMPORT dialog, set Presets to Model. The preset selects the right options for you — Import mode switches to Add new, and under INCLUDE only Objects and Blendshapes stay enabled (no animation on this pass). Click Import.
2. Rig the model
Cascadeur asks “Enter rig mode to rig the imported model?” — answer Yes.
The Quick Rigging Tool opens with the mimem skeleton already mapped. With a mimem export you should see “The character has been fully recognized” — click Ok, check the mapping in the BODY, HAND LEFT, HAND RIGHT and TWISTS tabs, then click Add rig elements at the bottom of the window.
Important: Do not assign twist bones (like forearm_twist_1 or thigh_twist_1) to Body slots. This causes “duplicate joint assignment” errors and crashes rig generation. Let twist bones auto-detect, or assign them only in the Twists section.
If you see “Hinge problem” warnings on joints like forearm_r or calf_r, make sure you processed the animation in mimem with Insert T-Pose at keyframe 0 checked — a missing T-pose is a common cause.
3. Import the animation
Go back to File → Import → Import Fbx/Dae and pick the same .fbx file again — this time with Presets set to Animation. The preset switches Import mode to Update and enables Animations under INCLUDE, so the motion is applied onto the rig you just generated instead of adding a second character. Click Import.
If your animation has straight knees or extended elbows, do the LimbDirection trick before this import — it has to be set up before the animation is applied.
4. Extend the timeline
A fresh Cascadeur scene has a short timeline (100 frames), so a longer take looks truncated even though all of it was imported — the status message tells you the real range, for example “animation pasted on frames from 0 to 3470”.
Click the frame count field in the bottom-right corner of the timeline to extend it to the animation’s full extent.
Scrub the timeline to confirm the whole take plays back.
Fixing knee and elbow popping
Sometimes the knees or elbows pop on a few frames after import — most visibly when the leg is close to straight. This is a mismatch between how Cascadeur models a limb and how mimem captures one:
- Cascadeur’s rig is rigid on purpose. When the rig is generated, elbows and knees are constrained to a hinge connection: they bend on one axis only, inside the bending plane defined by the default T- or A-pose.
- A real elbow or knee doesn’t. mimem has to match the actor’s performance exactly for high accuracy, so it doesn’t apply that simplification — in a mimem animation the lower arm and calf bones can carry rotation on several axes.
When such an animation is baked onto the hinge-constrained Cascadeur rig, the extra rotation has nowhere to go and the joint can pop on some frames, in proportion to how far off-plane it goes.
The fix, recommended by the Cascadeur team, is to take the LimbDirection controllers out of the equation while the animation is applied:
- Before applying the animation (before step 3 above), select all LimbDirection controllers — the pole vectors for both arms and both legs.
- In the Limb Direction behavior, turn off the “is active” bool. This disables the LimbDir controllers’ influence on the arm and leg controllers.
- Import and apply the animation as described in step 3.
- Turn the same “is active” bool back on across the entire animated timeline, so you can move the LimbDir controllers again.
Most of the time this is enough to keep the limbs stable through the whole take. If some popping remains, it’s local to a few frames and can be smoothed with Cascadeur’s regular tools.
Auto-posing
With the rig generated and the animation applied, Cascadeur’s Auto-Posing works immediately on mimem animations. Use it to:
- Push or restyle a pose while the physics keeps the body plausible
- Adapt the performance to a character whose proportions differ from the actor’s
- Blend, retime or extend the take with Cascadeur’s interpolation tools
Retargeting to your character
You usually don’t need Cascadeur for this: mimem retargets the take onto your own character — any rig, stylized included — when you export it, so import that FBX and edit it directly.
If you’d rather retarget inside Cascadeur (for example onto a rig you keep only there), import your target character into the scene, use Cascadeur’s retargeting tools to transfer the animation, and export the result as FBX.
Troubleshooting
| Problem | Likely Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Character imports but doesn’t move | Only the Model pass was done | Import the same FBX again with the Animation preset (step 3) |
| Animation stops short / plays only the first ~100 frames | Timeline still at the scene’s default length | Click the frame count in the bottom-right corner of the timeline to extend it (step 4) |
| A second character appears in the scene | Animation imported with Add new instead of Update | Undo, then re-import with the Animation preset, which sets Update |
| Knees or elbows pop, especially when nearly straight | Cascadeur’s hinge constraint vs. the captured off-plane rotation | Disable “is active” on the LimbDirection controllers before applying the animation, then re-enable it — see Fixing knee and elbow popping |
| Quick Rigging crashes with “duplicate joint assignment” | Twist bones manually assigned to Body slots | Re-run with defaults — let twists auto-detect or use the Twists section only |
| Auto-Posing says “no objectIds” | Rig wasn’t generated successfully | Re-run Quick Rigging Tool with default settings |
| Character starts in wrong pose | Missing T-pose at keyframe 0 | Re-process in mimem with Insert T-Pose at keyframe 0 checked |
| “Hinge problem” warning on forearm/calf | Often caused by missing T-pose at keyframe 0 | Re-process in mimem with Insert T-Pose at keyframe 0 checked |
| Root drifts or floats | Root motion missing | Re-export from mimem with Include Root Motion checked (the default) |