Online animations tools provide game designers and developers with a broad choice of animation packs and fine-grained editing tools to create animations suitable for any game genre. In this article, we are going to review two animation tools: Mixamo 2.0 and Norah AI. Mixamo 2.0 is an established animation brand developed by Mixamo, a company bought by Adobe Systems in 2015. Norah AI is an animation software recently released by a start-up Absentia, that seeks to create a totally new approach to game design and animation based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Mixamo 2.0

Mixamo 2.0 is one of the most popular web-based animation tools that offers a great repository of animations, characters, and editing functionality that leverage the power of the WebGL technology in modern browsers. Mixamo’s key feature is a searchable and alterable collection of animation packs organised by common themes and genres. With Mixamo, you have access to thousands of animations packed into the Creature pack, Locomotion pack, Pro Magic pack, Pro Rifle pack with combat animations, Scary Zombie pack, and more. All these animations are professionally captured, directed, and cleaned in Mixamo studio which makes them complete for production use in video games.

Mixamo’s animation tool

Once you have selected an animation pack, you have access to a full collection of movements and stances needed to describe numerous states of your character. For instance, a zombie pack features a zombie walking, zombie neck bite, zombie scream, zombie crawl and other locomotion and stances you normally expect from your zombie characters. Now, you can adjust these pre-sets to your specific requirements by tuning various parameters such as overdrive/speed, stride, character arm-space and more. Even better, Mixamo 2.0 supports sequences, which are compound animations created by blending multiple single animations into series. For example, with Mixamo you can opt to have one punch animation and then another to form a double punch sequence. After customization, you may apply your animations to characters taken either from pre-set Mixamo repository or to your own characters.

After everything is done, you may download your animations into FBX, BVH, or Collada, or bring them into game engines or 3D software for further customization. All these steps are incredibly easy, even for a person with meagre or no programming and technical background. The entire process right from selecting your animation to putting it into your shopping cart and downloading to your computer is very intuitive, straightforward, and fast.

Norah AI: AI-first approach to animation

Norah AI recently released by the technology start-up Absentia is a powerful alternative to the Mixamo 2.0 animation tool. Norah is an AI-based system that ships with auto-rigging, facial expression and animation generation and offers even creation animation blending and mixing functionality. These tools are available as a cloud-based solution for animators, game designers, and developers on the Norah AI website. As a full-fledged animation tool, Norah AI shares several resemblances with Mixamo 2.0. As Mixamo 2.0, it offers a rich repository of animations and the UI for animation editing out of the box. Norah AI has a user-friendly customization interface along with sliders to edit timing, frames, and motions to make sure each animation is satisfactory b efore downloading. Norah AI also supports animation retargeting to user models and characters.

Norah AI’s animation repository

However, the main difference of Norah AI from the conventional tools like Mixamo is its AI based approach that uses neural networks to create a boundless variety of animations. Absentia employs this approach to radically reshape the world of game design with a functionality that allows for automatic generation of animations, game maps, textures, characters, and stories. Norah’s animation tool is the first step in this direction. Unlike conventional animation tools, it does not work with animations that are manually prepared from motion capture data. Rather, it learns generic animation patterns by studying a huge training set of over a half million of animation frames using state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms.

Generative models used in Norah’s neural networks are able to learn complex and compound animations for all game design usages, characters and covering all conceivable types of movements. Since Norah AI learns generic patterns of animation, animators now opt for blending or merging existing animations together. This process, implemented via their Style Transfer tool, achieves striking results. Norah AI is capable of combining divergent types of movements such as hip-hop with Bharatanatyam or twerking with leg kicks. This functionality is more dominant than non-AI sequencing and blending approaches used in conventional animation tools.

Norah’s Auto Rigging makes adding a skeleton easy

Norah’s animation functionality is packed into the intuitive and easy to use UI. To blend your animations, you first select the base animation (e.g counting, dancing) and short animation to be merged with it. After that, you may adjust the blending level and offset parameters that control the timing of blending, duration, and a level of integration with the base animation. This easy process can actually produce an infinite number of movement variations. A similar technique is used in Norah’s Face Emotion animations. Norah AI can mix key emotional states along the psychological spectrum. As a result, you can produce smooth transitions between happiness and sadness, alertness and sleepiness automatically. The first module of these tools are available on the norah.ai website while the rest will be released over the coming months. Right now, the users will be able to experiment with the animation module of Norah AI absolutely free.

Hopefully, you are now excited to try Mixamo 2.0 and Norah AI — two powerful tools that make the life of animators and game designers easier. With all animations cooked in the cloud, the users will no longer need to invest in expensive hardware and desktop software. Mixamo is soon also merging with Adobe’s Creative Suite and won’t be available as a standalone tool on its own. Norah though, seems to be just getting started with their vision of creating an AI accelerated game engine. Both offer similar functionality for animating 3D models but both seem to be headed towards different directions.