Animate characters in Adobe Aero

Learn how to import animations into your Aero scene and give life to your augmented reality experience.

Importing Character Animations into Aero

How to import your characters and animations into Adobe Aero.

What you learned: The best methods for importing animation into Aero and how to apply them onto your characters and objects.

Based on your needs, bring animations into Aero by:
- Importing your character as 1 GLB or FBX, with a single animation applied.
- Importing your character as 1 GLB or FBX, with multiple animations embedded.
- Importing individual animations as single FBX files and applying them directly to your character already in the Aero scene. The skeletons must match between the asset in the scene and the imported animations.
- Importing multiple animations embedded as 1 FBX file and apply them directly onto your character in the Aero scene. The skeletons must match between the asset in the scene and the imported animations.
Embedded animations must be embedded upon export from your 3D animation package.
Animations can be imported as GLB, GLTF, FBX files or a mixture of the three.
Skeletons must match between the character, or object, in your scene and the animations you are importing onto them.
- FBX imports can play on GLB assets when the skeletons are the same.
- You only need the skeletal joint data when importing FBX animation onto a character, or object, already in your scene. You do not need the mesh or materials.
While this tutorial focused on character animation, these processes work well for any asset with animation (i.e. an animated button).
Mixamo is a great resource for characters and animations: www.mixamo.com.

Using character animations to help tell an interactive augmented reality story.

What you learned: How to use all the techniques we learned through all the tutorials to tell an interactive AR story.

The Duplicate Selection button creates a virtual copy of the object without increasing the weight of your Aero scene.
The Transition option in the Play Animation Behavior Builder panel will create a small blend between actions and can be used to help remove animation pops and glitches.
Animation states can be achieved by hiding and unhiding a duplicated object/character within 1 frame.
You can apply multiple Start triggers to your scene depending on your needs.
Pressing “Q” switches the pivot point from local to world orientation on your selected object.
Animated PNG sequences must be imported into Aero as a ZIP file.

Intelligent characters that you can “direct” while creating your augmented reality experience.

What you learned: How to use the simple yet powerful directable characters in augmented reality.

Directable characters can be found in the Starter Assets.
Directable Characters are leveraging Adobe Sensei to move in a natural and believable way, removing many of the animation hurdles creators struggle with.
Play Animation actions can trigger one off motions on the Directable Characters.
The Path Move action on mobile is a fast and efficient way to generate a path for your Directable Characters.

Pro tip

Import your rigged character without animations as a GLB, taking advantage of all the great material detail that format has to offer. Then import your animations as just joint data, no mesh or materials, using the FBX format.

Experience the scenes in augmented reality by scanning the QR codes below!

Importing Character Animations into Aero

Adding Animations to your Character in Aero