Auto Rig Pro Mixamo Animation to RC Pro

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Created 2d

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Hi! I have been struggling with this for a little while and most of what I've found has not helped much. I hope to find more success here.

Essentially, I have a model I've made in Blender. I rigged it using Auto Rig Pro, and I've also used ARP to add a Mixamo animation to it. That all works fine in Blender. However, when I try to import this model into RCP, I don't get the animation. The "default subtree animation" is completely empty. I attribute this to my lack of experience in this field but here's what I've attempted thus far:

Pushing the Mixamo keyframes into an NLA strip. I'm pretty sure this is the correct line of action, but I'm definitely not doing something right.
Baking the animation (?)

I've made sure that I have animation checked when I export the model!

Any ideas or reference projects would be lovely. I haven't really found much that has pushed me in the right direction. This project is, unfortunately, kind of time sensitive, so I would appreciate help ASAP. Thank you and let me know if I can add anymore context!

Screenshot 2026-01-05 at 16.23.23.png

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Answer 1

Vision Pro Engineer OP

Apple

1d

Hello @SweetLovingLies, thank you for your question! Thanks for confirming you have checked the Animation box when exporting.

I recommend reviewing the official Blender documentation, Exporting to USD Files, which is available here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/import_export/usd.html#exporting-to-usd-files. I am not sure how AutoRigPro is implemented, but it is possible that it is using a Blender feature that Blender is unable to export to USD (absolute shape keys, bendy bones, etc.).

My advice is to try to start with a minimal scene and see if you can get that working. For example, I just now created two cubes stacked on each other, each parented to two bones, and created a simple animation where the top cube wobbles. I also tested another simple example in a separate project, where I animated vertex groups on a single cube using a bone. I was able to successfully export both of these mesh+rig+animations to USDs. Your humanoid model with a mixamo animation is of course more complex than this, but you might be able to identify differences in the setup by comparing a simple example with your complex example.

Baking the animation (?)

Were you able to "bake" your animations successfully? Baking in this context refers to the process of converting things like cloth simulations, modifiers, constraints, etc. into keyframes that can then be exported to USD. Without baking, Blender will not be able to export these kinds of animations as expected.

I also recommend reaching out to the Blender community about this topic, as well as the authors of AutoRigPro if possible. AutoRigPro documentation mentions FBX and GLTF, but not USD, so any clarification from them would be extremely valuable.

Let me know if that helps!

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Answer 2

SweetLovingLies OP

1d

Accepted Answer

Hi friends. Not even a day later and I already solved my issue. For anyone in the future who might need this, here's what I did:

After retargeting the Mixamo animation (and confirming it works), export the model as an FBX FROM the ARP export "tab". From there, you can reimport it to Blender, bake the animation in the pose -> bake animation menu, and it should import into RCP perfectly fine from there. Hope this helps someone out because I racked my brain over this for hours.

1

Answer 3

Vision Pro Engineer OP

Apple

1d

Thank you so much for sharing your solution! I'm very happy you were able to solve this. :)

Regarding your comment:

Also, I don't remember how I ended up on NLA strips, but contrary to my original post, that was not the correct course of action. haha

Blender's NLA editor is useful when you need to export multiple animations in a single file. A USD file can only contain a single animation at a time, so a workaround I've suggested elsewhere is to line up your animations in the NLA, export them all as a single animation, and then chop up your animations inside RCP to work with them individually.

Thanks again!

1