Turn a video into a 3D animation

Your move, on a 3D character

Film yourself — or anyone — doing the move you need: a walk, a jump, a punch, a dance, a wave. Drop the video here, and the page follows the person through it and hands back that motion as an animation: on your own character if you add one, on our mannequin if you do not.

The result is a GLB with the character and the animation in it, ready for Blender, Unity, Godot or Unreal — or, if you want the raw motion for your own retargeting, a BVH file on a standard humanoid skeleton.

Fingers included. A fist, a point, a wave with the fingers spread: the hands come through with the rest of the body, on any character with finger bones — our mannequin has them.

Feet that stay on the ground

The giveaway of cheap motion capture is a character that skates: its feet slide while they should be planted, or float a few centimetres above the floor. Here, every moment a foot is on the ground in the video it is held still on the floor of your character, and the leg bends to keep it there.

Travel is kept too: a walk across the room walks across the scene, a turn turns. If you are making a game loop and want the character to stay on the spot, pick In place — jumps and crouches still go up and down.

On your own character

Add a humanoid GLB, FBX or VRM as the second file and the motion is carried onto it, fitted to its proportions rather than replayed on top of them — a short character does not float and a long-legged one does not sink.

A character with no skeleton is rigged first, with the same rigger as the auto-rig page. A character that already has a humanoid skeleton — Mixamo, Unreal Mannequin, Unity or Godot humanoid names — keeps it.

How to film it

The whole body in frame, head to feet, the whole time. A foot that leaves the frame is a foot the page has to guess.

Sharp and high resolution. 1080p or more, in focus. The hands should be clearly visible for the fingers to come through.

Close enough. The person should fill most of the height of the picture. A small figure far away comes out with shakier arms and legs, and a walk straight toward the camera hides the steps.

One person. With two people in view it follows one, and not necessarily the one you meant.

A still camera. Lean the phone against something. A camera that pans or walks makes the room move, and that movement ends up in the animation.

Light and contrast. Daylight or a bright room, clothes that stand out from the wall behind. Loose, flowing clothes hide the knees and elbows.

Side-on and three-quarter views both work. Face the camera for moves where the arms cross in front of the body.

What it does not do (yet)

Facial expressions are not captured — the head turns and tilts as one piece.

It follows one person. Moves on the floor — rolls, breakdance, lying down — come out much less reliably than standing ones, and so do moves where most of the body is hidden from the camera.

A free account animates up to 10 seconds of a video, Pro up to 30; a longer video is cut there.

Against the usual alternatives

Other video mocap services charge credits for every second of motion. Here a free account gets five videos a month, fingers included, and Pro takes as many as you like.

Mocap suits and multi-camera studios are more precise, and they are the right tool for a film or a AAA game. For a prototype, an indie game, a VTuber model or a social clip, a phone video gets you most of the way at no cost.

Animating by hand gives you total control and takes hours per second of motion. A captured take is a good starting point to clean up in the editor.

How to use it

1. Film the move with the whole body in view and the camera still.
2. Drop the video into the box above. Add your own character as the second file, or leave it out for the mannequin.
3. Pick whether the character travels or stays in place, and GLB or BVH.
4. Press Animate. The preview shows your video beside the character doing the move.

Questions

The other tools

• Batch processing — Run any Rig Bake tool over a whole folder of models and get one zip back.
• Reduce polygons — Cut the triangle count of a GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, STL, PLY, VOX or VRM — or a zipped model folder — and keep the textures. Runs in your browser, no file size limit, nothing uploaded.
• Quad remesh — Rebuild any mesh as clean quads with real edge flow, in your browser — with the UVs and textures rebuilt onto the new surface too. Reads GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, STL, PLY, VOX and VRM, with no file size limit.
• Bake a normal map — Bake high-poly detail into a normal map (and ambient occlusion) for a light version of the model — the xNormal workflow, in your browser. Drop one heavy model, or add your own low-poly and the maps bake onto its UVs. No upload, no account, no file size limit.
• Compress GLB — Name the file size you need and get it. Drop a GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, STL, PLY, VOX or VRM — or a zipped model folder — and the page works down a list: dead weight first, then the mesh bytes, then the textures, and only then the triangles. In your browser, no file size limit.
• FBX to GLB — Convert an FBX — Mixamo, Blender, an AI generator — into a GLB, with the centimetre scale fixed on the way through. Any size, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
• Auto-rig a character — Give a humanoid model a skeleton and skin weights, in your browser. Drop a static character — from an AI generator, a scan or a sculpt — and get back an animation-ready GLB.
• Check a 3D model for problems — The Model doctor: find what is wrong with a model before it wastes your afternoon — wrong scale, broken bind pose, inverted normals, overlapping UVs, holes. Reads GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, STL, PLY, VOX and VRM, any size, in your browser.
• Repair a 3D model — Weld split vertices, drop degenerate faces and stray islands, fill holes, flip inverted normals. GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, STL, PLY, VOX or VRM — any size, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
• Pixel art from 3D — Drop an animated model, get a pixel-art spritesheet. The palette, the dither and the direction set are already chosen — fine-tuning lives in the editor.
• GLB to STL — Convert a 3D model to a printable STL — scaled to real millimetres, turned Z-up, and told plainly whether it is watertight. GLB, GLTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, PLY, VOX or VRM in, any size, in your browser.
• OBJ to GLB — Convert an .obj into a GLB that engines and browsers read. Geometry and UVs travel; OBJ has nothing else to carry. Any size, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
• GLB to USDZ — Convert a 3D model to USDZ for AR Quick Look on iPhone and iPad — textures included. Any size, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
• LOD Generator — Turn one model into a chain of LOD meshes — each level a measured step down, zipped together with per-level stats. In your browser, nothing uploaded.
• Merge Materials — Merge every mesh and material into one mesh with one atlased material — draw calls collapse to a single one. In your browser, nothing uploaded.
• Everything else Rig Bake does — rigging, retargeting, spritesheets, VFX.