🎬 Retarget inside Blender

Get your Mimem motion capture onto any character rig in Blender — in five steps. This guide uses the Mocap Blender add-on for a non-destructive retargeting workflow.

What You’ll Need

Once Mocap Blender is installed, its panel lives in the sidebar: press N → MB tab.

Quick Start

Step 1: Import and Prepare

Import both your target character rig and the Mimem mocap file into the same Blender scene.

Before anything else, make sure both armatures are set up cleanly:

1. Select your target armature in Object mode
2. Press Ctrl+A → Rotation & Scale to apply transforms
3. Verify both armatures face the same direction

Step 2: Register Your Armatures with Mocap Blender

Open the Mocap Blender panel (N → MB tab):

1. In Target Armature, select your character rig using the eyedropper or input field
2. In Motion Capture Armatures, select your Mimem mocap armature, give it a name (no underscores), and click Add Motion Capture Armature
3. In Mark Retarget Bones, select your target armature, switch to Pose Mode (Ctrl+Tab), select the bones you want to retarget, and click Make Retarget Bones

Step 3: Map Your Bones

Now tell Mocap Blender which mocap bone drives which rig bone.

In the Connect Target Controllers panel:

1. Expand Root Controllers — pick your root bone with the eyedropper, click Apply As Root Bone, select the matching mocap pose target, and click Add Root Constraint
2. Expand Pose Controllers — for each bone, click the eyedropper and pick the matching pose target in the viewport. Work from the body outward.
3. After finishing one side, click Auto Mirror Pose Target Entries in the Controller List Operator subpanel to fill in the other side automatically

Step 4: Retarget

With all bones mapped:

1. In the Controller List Operator subpanel, check Auto Retarget
2. Click Batch Add Constraint

That’s it — your character is now driven by the Mimem mocap data.

The process is fully non-destructive. Click Batch Remove Constraints at any time to start over.

Step 5: Bake and Export

Once you’re happy with the result, bake the animation into keyframes:

1. In the Bake Animation panel, set your Start Frame and End Frame
2. Check Delete Constraints (recommended — prevents double transformation on export)
3. Click Bake

Your animation now lives as keyframes on your target armature, ready to export to any game engine or 3D application.

Fine-Tuning

Auto retargeting handles most of the work, but you may want to adjust a few bones — feet, head, or arms are common. Everything in this section is optional.

Adjusting Bone Orientations

The Adjust Pose Target operator lets you interactively rotate a pose target right in the viewport:

1. In Pose Controllers, click the Adjust Pose Target button (spinning arrow icon) next to the bone
2. Move your mouse to rotate (trackball-style in view space)
3. Click LMB to apply the adjustment

After adjusting one or more bones, bake the corrections into the delta rotations so they become the permanent base orientation:

1. Select the adjusted bones in Pose Mode
2. In Controller List Operator → Batch Edit Pose Target Rotations, click Batch Rotation Add To Deltas

Keyframing Per-Frame Fixes

If a bone looks correct overall but breaks at a specific frame (e.g., an arm clipping at one pose), you can keyframe corrections. The Adjust Pose Target operator supports keyframing with I and ALT+I:

1. Activate the operator on the bone → press I to keyframe the current (good) state → operator exits
2. Scrub to the problem frame → activate again → correct the rotation → press I → operator exits
3. Scrub to where it’s fine again → activate → press SPACE to reset → operator exits
4. Activate one more time → press I to keyframe the zeroed-out state

This creates a smooth correction that ramps in, fixes the problem, and ramps back out.

Batch keyframe operations are also available in Controller List Operator → Batch Edit Pose Target Keyframes: Add All Keyframes, Delete All Keyframes, and Clear All Keyframes.

Saving Presets

After mapping bones and tweaking deltas, save a preset so you can reuse the setup with future mocap files:

1. In Presets (inside Connect Target Controllers), enter a name and click Add Preset (+)
2. For new mocap armatures, select the preset from the dropdown and click Apply Preset — all bone mappings and deltas are restored instantly
3. You can also Apply Deltas From Preset to load just the delta values, or Update Preset after making changes

Important: Create the preset after running Batch Add Constraint — the preset stores delta values only if constraints have been connected.

The preset is stored as a custom property on the target armature, so you can copy the raw string between Blender files.

Troubleshooting

Additional Resources

• Mocap Blender add-on — purchase, documentation, and tutorials