Roadmap for Fuse / Mixamo?

[andrew.perdzock]

Is there any sort of road map of what is happening with Fuse / Mixamo? I realize that previously it was anounced that development on fuse was coming to an end, however what does that mean for Mixamo?

Are there plans to replace Fuse with something similar? I remember seeing on the Fuse forum (now gone?) that there are active plans for the future development of Mixamo?

[Ussnorway]

• so far Adobe has said that Fuse will stop downloading from the cloud at the end of this month [26th]
• that this new Mixamo forum will stay up and the old Fuse forum will be locked
• there are zero plans beyond that... at least public ones
• no one knows what will happen to Photoshop sync to cc library Fuse characters one way or the other

[andrew.perdzock]

By Fuse will stop downloading from the cloud does that mean it will no longer install from Adobe CC, or does it mean that If you already have it, it will stop sending characters to Mixamo?

[garethb30904673]

okay Adobe, now that Fuse is gone and Mixamo is the way forward, what can we expect to see in the (near) future? The whole point of fuse was that we could customise our own characters, now it seems we have to choose from pre-made characters... not very satisfying as a creative experience. Would love to hear that such functionality is in the pipeline / would hate to think that what we see now is all we will ever see...

thoughts, thanks!

[JMathews]

Hey all!  Jeanette here (PM for Dimension, and formerly Mixamo/Fuse.  Mixamo has a new PM and team now!).  There's limited info I can provide on a public forum, but I'll do my best here.  I am only responding for Fuse, not Mixamo and we should separate these mthreads because they are different products.

Short Term (Fuse)

• Fuse has officially been end-of-lifed and is no longer a supported product as of September 13th, 2020.
• Uploads from Fuse to Mixamo will stop functioning soon.
• We have closed the Fuse forums and opened these Mixamo forums.  We will not be answering questions about Fuse in the future, as it is an unsupported product.
• Characters that are already synced to Creative Cloud Libraries will continue to be available for the present.  Any decision to remove that technology preview will be handled by the Photoshop team and announced via the Photoshop channels.

Short Term (Mixamo)

• Mixamo does not have any immediate updates planned
• Mixamo DOES have a team who will maintain the infrastructure (they have other things they work on, which is why no immediate udpates).

Long Term (Characters)

As described during the end of life announcement, the decision to discontinue Fuse was more about technology than desire.  We see character creation as an important part of our ecosystem of 3D at Adobe.  I don't have anything I can announce, but we hope to bring more characters into the world moving forward. 

[garethb30904673]

Thanks Jeanette,

Appreciate that there is only so much you can say publically, and for letting us "read between the lines" for some things you can't say.

On the downside I think it's slightly concerning that << Mixamo has a new PM and team now >> yet here we are on a Mixamo forum (I assume we are, I find adobe's navigation / search to be 90% guesswork) yet there is no Mixamo spokesperson as such, and it falls to the PM of Dimension to address the community...

On the upside, I take comfort from << We see character creation as an important part of our ecosystem of 3D >> Hope to see that in my lifetime!

Curiously, there is still quite a bit of Fuse stuff lurking around the adobe/CC website - example attached, screengrabbed today... 

Thanks again!

[JMathews]

That's a fair point!  I've been on Mixamo/Fuse for years and started in support, actually!  So I happen to be fairly active on different forums and wanted to check in myself even if I'm not really working on Mixamo directly anymore.

Adobe is... very big.  Thanks for catching that asset!  We're working with the Help teams to update some outdated FAQs and remove some content still.

[P.Ing]

Hi there, Gareth, I am the Principal Product Manager for 3D & Immersive Web & Cloud. I'm relatively new to Adobe and we have recently unified web and cloud initiatives under a unified umbrella to strengthen our future vision and efforts in these areas. Mixamo is now part of our portfolio so I want to assure you that we will be maintaining it for the future. We understand how important character animation is to 3D projects so while there is nothing I can announce at this time, know that we hear you and find characters important, too.

[hardleft121]

Hi Gareth,

Thanks for dropping by.  Congratulations on being PPM for a whole lotta 3D world, and Mixamo.  Now that Fuse is gone, many of us are using other tools to create characters and blend shapes for which we used Fuse.  Many of us would still like to use Mixamo, moving forward.  I realize Mixamo lets you upload rigged FBX files, but the rigged FBX files from our "post-Fuse" tools throw errors when importing into Mixamo.  The other way to upload characters is through the upload obj files and placement of joints.  While this works, it does not allow for blend shapes.  No one wants to animate an emotionless stone-faced character, however.

If any resources are dedicated to Mixamo, focusing on allowing it to be part of a useable workflow would be a wise investment.  Helping us import into Mixamo from the tools we are now using to create characters and blend shapes, would be awesome.

Resepctfully,

Greg/Hardleft121

[P.Ing]

Hi Greg, 

Haha, sorry, my name is actually Polly. I was replying to Gareth's post above. 🙂 Yes, Mixamo remains a super useful tool and we want to invest more in it in the future. Unfortunately, in the short term we can only put resources towards it to keep it up and running. But in the long term we want to do more! I'm certainly interested to know what tools you use now to create characters and blend shapes.

Thanks for your reply,

Polly

[hardleft121]

Oh my gosh, sorry Polly.  I should have read more closely.  Between the name being wrong, and the typos; whoa.  Thank you for the response.  Regarding other tools to make customized characters and blendshapes, the only thing that I see as hopeful is Character Creator 3 (often called CC3).  With the fairly new Headshot plug-in you can get automated and customized facial feature slider adjustments very similar to what we used in Fuse.  It automatcially rigs the character and creates blend shapes that are eported via .FBX.  When imported into 3DS Max, the blend shapes are there, ready to be keyframed to impart emotion in the characters. While Fuse came with about 4-5 males and 5-6 female customizable base figures, CC3 comes with 2 or 3 of each, however adding a dozen high-qulaity cusomizable base meshes is like only $100-150.  The clothes offerings are similar, in my opinion.  With Fuse, I could go from a photograph to a custom rigged, blend shaped character in like an hour.  Furthermore I could get it into 3DS Max as a CATrig or a Biped with the old scripts that were removed from the Fuse site aways back.  Anyway, I have rambled.  Thank you for the response and the leadership moving forward.  - Greg

[P.Ing]

Thanks for your response, Greg. This is great input and very valuable as we head into the future!

[kurtmelECS]

Hi Polly,

I, like Greg, have had to turn to CC3 in an effort to create usable characters for lip-synching and facial animation. I rely on the pipeline version which allows export to the various game engines, mainly UE4 and Unity. I find the interface quite cumbersome after using FUSE in the past, later versions of FUSE also allowed for creating more cartoon style characters which you have to pay extra for the same capability in CC3. While the combination of iClone 7 and CC3 gives me an avenue for lip-synching and animating expressions/facial animationI really wish that Adobe would incorporate all the FUSE capabilities into their current incarnation of Character Animator so we had a means to animate both 3D and 2D characters using thier puppet rigs and webcam intergration, this would be a huge timesaver that again costs additional money in the reallusions platforms IC7/CC3. Aero is NOT the best direction for FUSE, Character Animator is IMHO, including the incorporation of Mixamo auto-rigging and auto blend shapes for both basic 9 emotion expressions and visemes for lipsynch. Lets not have Adobe make the same aggregious mistakes they made with Molehill and the 3D Flash API, although lack of Apple support was the nail in its proverbial coffin for Flash anyway besides the general shift away from any propriatary player technologies - period. Which is good in the long run, but sure wish Adobe would get on the stick with WebGL output and support, including 3D character creation and animation in Character Animator.

[andrew.perdzock]

Thanks Jeanette for taking the time to give me a proper response! Looking forward to see what that "bringing more characters into the world" means from adobe!

[Cliffbanks123]

Shutting down this service has had a broad and negative customer impact.

[Ussnorway]

iclone is Windows only (as is all good 3D & 4D software)