Retargeting MetaHuman Animation in Blender Just Got Easy
Character Control Rig Addon v0.3.1 adds a built-in retargeting engine that maps animation from 8 different skeletons straight onto your control rig.
Retargeting animation onto a MetaHuman control rig in Blender used to mean a pile of manual bone mapping, A-Pose/T-Pose wrangling, and hoping the proportions worked out. Not anymore. The Character Control Rig Addon v0.3.1 ships with a built-in retargeting engine that takes an imported animation file and maps it straight onto your control rig.
A Retargeting Engine Built For Your Control Rigs
The headline feature of v0.3.1 is auto-retargeting. Import an animation file, it detect the source skeleton, and the addon's retargeting templates do the heavy lifting. There are no manual mapping steps to walk through and no A-Pose/T-Pose rigs to adjust by hand. The engine recognizes the incoming skeleton and drives your control rig's controls directly, so the result is immediately editable animation rather than a baked-in mocap layer you have to fight with.
Eight Skeletons Supported Out of the Box
v0.3.1 ships with auto-retargeting templates for the skeletons most people are actually working with:
- Mixamo
- MetaHuman
- UE4 Mannequin
- UE5 Mannequin
- SOMA
- Reallusion
- Rokoko
- Xsens
That covers the free Mixamo library, Unreal Engine's stock mannequins, and the output of the major mocap suits, which means most animation you already own can land on a MetaHuman control rig without a detour through another retargeting tool.
Auto Rig Pro Support Is Here
This one came straight from user requests. The Character Control Rig Addon now supports two rig frameworks, so you can pick the one that fits your workflow:
- Rigify — Blender's built-in rigging system
- Auto Rig Pro — the popular third-party rigging addon
Both frameworks get the same control rig features and the same retargeting engine, so the choice is purely about which toolset your studio or pipeline is already standardized on.
Version requirements: Auto Rig Pro support requires Character DNA 0.12.9 or higher and Auto Rig Pro 3.78.34 or higher. Update both before enabling the Auto Rig Pro framework.
Faster Animation Imports and Live Evaluation
The Character Control Rig Addon isn't the only thing that got an upgrade. Character DNA v0.12.9 brings two changes that meaningfully shorten the loop between capture and render.
Up to 5x Faster Animation Imports
Animation import now runs on ufbx, a fast, dependency-free FBX parser. In practice that means up to a 5x speed increase when bringing animation files into Blender. On long performance captures, that is the difference between a coffee break and a click.
Render Straight From the Face Board
We also redesigned how the evaluation system integrates OpenRigLogic. Animation driven live from the face board and driver bones can now be rendered directly, which removes the bake-before-you-render step that used to be mandatory. If you are producing your final frames in Cycles or EEVEE, you can iterate on the performance and hit render without an intermediate bake pass every time.
Full details are in the Character DNA v0.12.9 release notes.
What Should We Support Next?
Did we miss a skeleton you rely on? The retargeting template system is designed to grow, and we would rather add the formats people are actually using than guess. Tell us what should come next in the Character Control Rig Addon discussions.
Get Started
Watch the video to see the retargeting engine in action, then grab the Character Control Rig Addon and start animating today.
More updates coming soon.
