Mixamo sees fast growth for its Fuse 3D game character creation tools

A lot of people have the urge to create their own game characters, and Mixamo is cashing in on that. The company makes it easy for just about anyone to create 3D-animated characters for games, and it now has more than 300,000 users. The company also increased its number of paying users by nearly tenfold.

That’s a pretty big change in the past year, and it’s happening for a bunch of reasons. Users are getting more creative, as evidenced by the popularity of user-generated content in games such as Minecraft. Indie game studios can also more easily use Mixamo’s tools to create their own game characters quickly. And players themselves want to see themselves in games where they spend so much of their time.

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“It was a pretty epic year for Mixamo,” said Stefano Corazza, the chief executive of the San Francisco company, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We put together some incredible partnerships, and our user base grew quite a bit. Mixamo is handling that wave. We see a massive uptake in the number of characters. Mixamo is riding a wave.”

Mixamo wants to democratize game creation, or enable the masses to create high-quality games, rather than just professionally trained 3D artists. To that end, Mixamo released its Fuse 3D character creator tool in November 2013 on Valve’s Steam digital game distribution network. Fuse has a full library of 3D character body parts, clothing, and other assets for building digital game characters.

With Fuse, users can browse, resize, customize, and combine various body parts, textures, materials, clothing, and accessories to easily generate high-quality, royalty-free 3D characters in seconds. Once the user creates a character, he or she can then get those characters to move using Mixamo’s animation platform. That saves a lot of time in the process of creating a 3D modeled character. Getting a character to move, or rigging it, can take about three days. Now tens of thousands of rigged characters exist in the library.

“Fuse was initially designed for game developers,” Corazza said. “But everybody wants a more engaging experience.”

Corazza said that Mixamo’s users include advertisers, marketers, architects, and even consumers. Besides Valve, major partners have also jumped in to help Mixamo spread its tools. Those partners include Adobe, HP, Microsoft, Epic Games, and Unity Technologies.

Over time, Corazza said Mixamo will add the ability to scan a person and use that as the foundation of character art. The scanned data can be imported into Fuse and then animated. Mixamo is adding more games where you can export your characters into them, such as Valve’s Dota 2 or Garry’s Mod.

Fuse also comes preinstalled on HP’s new Sprout creativity computer.

Mixamo was founded in 2008 by 3D experts Corazza and Nazim Kareemi after they worked on animation technology at Stanford University. They raised $11 million to date from Granite Ventures, AMD, and Keynote Ventures.

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“We want Fuse to become a universally accepted character creator,” Corazza said.