Add Animation

Add Animation gives a rigged character a ready-made animation (an idle, a walk or a jog), so the .glb you export already moves when it reaches your game engine. Pick the clip from a list; nothing to download, nothing to retarget. Put it after Auto Rig, one Add Animation per clip.

What it does

The mesh comes out exactly as it went in. What changes is the rig it carries: the clip you pick is added to it. A clip is the motion of every joint over time, plus how the hips move. Export writes each clip the rig carries as an animation of the same name in the .glb, next to the skinned character.

The clips follow the joint names and bone directions of Mixamo’s skeleton, the same ones Auto Rig builds. That is why one clip plays on every character Auto Rig rigs, whatever its size or proportions. The hip movement is scaled to the character’s own hip height, so a short character and a tall one both keep their feet where they belong.

The clips

Clip	What it is
Idle	Standing relaxed in place, breathing and shifting weight a little, arms hanging. A 2.5 second loop.
Walk	A relaxed walk cycle, arms swinging. A 1.3 second loop.
Jog	A forward jog cycle. A 0.9 second loop.

Every clip plays in place. Walk and Jog bob up and down and sway from side to side with each step, but the character never moves forward. Your game’s character controller moves it around the level and picks the clip that fits its speed.

Every clip is a loop: its last frame is its first, so it repeats without a jump.

A character rigged with Fingers: Full also gets the finger motion of a clip. With Fingers: None the hands move as whole, and the fingers stay as they are on the mesh.

The clips are made from Quaternius’ Universal Animation Library, released under CC0 (public domain). They ship inside Forge, so they work offline and the exported file is yours to use however you like.

Adding several clips

Chain one Add Animation per clip, each set to a different clip, between Auto Rig and Export. For example: Auto Rig → Add Animation (Idle) → Add Animation (Walk) → Add Animation (Jog) → Export. The exported file holds every clip as its own named animation: Idle, Walk and Jog. Unreal, Unity (glTFast), Godot and Blender each import them as separate animations of the one character.

Adding a clip the rig already carries replaces the earlier one, and the node shows an amber note saying so.

Watching a clip

Display the Add Animation node and switch the viewport to the Rig view. The Motion picker at the start of the play bar already shows this node’s clip; press play to watch it on your character, and drag the scrub bar to stop at any moment. The picker also lists Auto Rig’s test motion and every other clip the rig carries by then. Moving the display flag along a chain of Add Animation nodes shows each clip in turn.

The viewport plays the clip from exactly the data Export writes into the .glb, so what you see is what your game gets. Watching is only for looking: the choice isn’t saved and changes nothing that cooks or exports.

Where to put it

Add Animation needs a rigged mesh: put Auto Rig before it. Wired to a mesh with no rig, the node shows an error asking for Auto Rig.

Keep it at the end of the chain, between Auto Rig and Export. A node that reshapes the mesh after it, such as Transform, Subdivide, Bevel or Boolean, drops the rig and every clip on it, and shows an amber note saying so. The paint nodes and Selection keep both.

Limits for now

The Unreal Engine Output node sends a static mesh, without the rig and its clips, and says so. To bring an animated character into Unreal, export a .glb and import that.

Inputs

Mesh

A rigged character: the output of Auto Rig (or a node after it that keeps the rig).

Outputs