🦴 Retarget to your own character
mimem captures a performance on its own skeleton. Your character has its own bones, its own proportions, and its own naming conventions. The retargeter moves the take from one to the other — automatically, and with IK so that feet stay planted and hands land where the actor put them.
What you need
| Your character | An .fbx file containing a skeleton. Meshes and materials come along for the preview; only the skeleton is used for retargeting. |
| A processed take | Any completed animation — open it from the Animations tab. |
| A paid plan | Saving a character, IK solving and exporting a retargeted FBX are on paid plans. On the free plan you can still drop a character in and watch the result in the browser. |
Add your character
There are two ways in, and both open the same dialog:
- Target characters in the sidebar — your reusable library. Drop an FBX here and it is available on every animation.
- The Retarget section of the 3D viewer — drop an FBX straight onto the take you are looking at.
Either way, the character studio opens: your character on a turntable on one side, its bone mapping on the other. Two ways out:
- Use without saving — the character loads into the viewer for a local preview. Nothing is uploaded.
- Save character — the character joins your library, ready for IK and export.
Saving also measures your rig. mimem reads the hips height straight out of the FBX rather than guessing it, so a character authored in centimetres and one authored in metres both land at the right size against the captured motion.
Save a character once and reuse it on every take — the My characters dropdown in the viewer reads the same library.
Bone mapping
mimem maps your skeleton automatically when the studio opens. These conventions are tested and supported:
- Unreal Engine skeletons, including the stock UE5 mannequin
- MetaHuman, body and face rigs
- Character Creator and iClone
- Mixamo
Beyond those, the mapper works from the skeleton’s hierarchy rather than its names — it finds the hips as the common ancestor of the legs and the neck, then walks outward — so custom and unfamiliar rigs usually map correctly too. The naming conventions it recognises include the mixamorig: and cc_base_ prefixes, and side markers written as left/right, .L/.R, _l_/_r_ or L_/R_.
The panel lists 52 slots, grouped into the centre chain, the arms and legs, and the fingers, with a mapped count on each group and on the panel as a whole. Anything the mapper did not fill reads Not mapped, so a glance down the list tells you what is left. The 30 finger slots are collapsed by default — open them if fingers matter to your take. Set any slot by hand from the dropdown beside it; Hips is the one that has to be filled.
Give the mapping a look before you save. A saved character keeps the mapping it was created with, so changing it later means adding the FBX again as a new character.
FK — the captured motion, unchanged
Pick a character and the result appears immediately, in your browser, with no processing and no cost. This is the FK retarget: the joint rotations mimem captured are copied onto your rig, bone for bone.
Nothing is interpolated, approximated or re-solved. Whatever the actor did, your character does — same timing, same joint angles, same weight. On a character whose proportions are close to the actor’s, FK alone is often all you need.
IK — precise placement
FK reproduces the actor’s joint angles. On a rig with different limb lengths, the same angles put the end of the limb somewhere slightly different: longer legs push a planted foot through the floor, shorter arms miss the prop the actor was holding.
IK fixes the other end of the chain. Rather than matching rotations alone, it pulls the foot or hand back to the world position mimem captured, and solves the limb to reach it.
Open the IK section and you get one slider per limb:
| Slider | What it does |
|---|---|
| Left foot / Right foot | Pulls the foot to its captured position. Feet start at full strength — this is what keeps contacts clean and stops sliding. |
| Left hand / Right hand | Pulls the hand to its captured position. Starts at zero — raise it when hands have to meet something precise: a prop, the other hand, the character’s own body. |
Each slider runs from 0 (pure FK, rotations only) to 1 (the limb goes where it was captured). Moving a slider changes nothing on its own — press Apply to run the solve. The result swaps in when it lands, and the status line tells you where you are: Solving IK…, IK applied, or Sliders changed — Apply to update.
Start with the defaults. Raise a hand slider only when you can see the hand missing its mark — at full strength on a rig with very different proportions, an arm can end up reaching further than the pose reads naturally.
Check it against the source
The Retarget section has two controls for comparing the result with what was captured:
- Show source animation — plays mimem’s own skeleton next to your character, on the same take.
- Source offset — slides the source aside, up to 3 metres, so the two do not overlap.
Run them side by side and any drift is obvious straight away.
Export
What is on screen is what gets exported: press Export FBX in the Export section and you get your rig, carrying the take. If an IK solve is applied, that is what gets baked; otherwise you get the FK result. A retargeted export has no format choice — the FBX round-trips your own skeleton.
See Exporting FBX for the full set of options and how the export allowance is counted.
Troubleshooting
| Problem | Likely Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Apply is greyed out | The character was loaded with Use without saving, or the current sliders are already applied | Save the character, or move a slider |
| “Save the character to run IK.” | Local preview only — the solve runs server-side | Reopen the studio with Edit character and choose Save character |
| “Save the character to export it.” | Same: the server has no copy of a local drop | Save the character, then export |
| Fingers do not move | The finger slots are unmapped | Open the character in the studio and expand the finger group to check. On a saved character, re-add the FBX and fill them before saving |
| Character is far too large or too small | The FBX declares a unit scale that does not match its geometry | Fix the scale in your DCC, re-export the FBX, add it again |
| Feet still slide | Foot IK lowered, or the capture itself is drifting | Raise the foot sliders and Apply; if it persists, see Foot Tracking Tips |
| A hand misses its prop | Hand IK is at zero by default | Raise the hand slider and Apply |
To go further
- Exporting FBX — export options, batch export, and how your allowance is counted.
- Import into Unreal Engine — when you want your takes on the stock UE5 skeleton instead.
- Retarget inside Blender — a hand-tunable, non-destructive setup inside Blender.
- Foot Tracking Tips — the capture side of clean contacts.