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Retarget

Retarget Mode moves an animation clip from one skeleton onto another: mocap onto your game rig, a downloaded clip onto your character. You map bones visually, preview live, and bake out a new clip.

Load a source and a target

The left panel has three sections:

  • Source Clip: click "Choose a clip..." and pick the animation to retarget. It accepts animation assets (like mocap BVH clips) and geometry assets that carry animation.
  • Target Rig: pick the geometry asset with the skeleton you want the motion on. No rig of your own yet? Kitly bundles a default fallback rig so you can test the flow.
  • Saved Maps: bone mappings you've saved, with export and delete per map, a field to save the current mapping under a name, and "Import map from file..." for .retargetmap.json files from teammates.

Preview

The center is a live preview with a playback transport. If the source clip came from Kitly's mocap, a "Reference" panel shows the original footage beside the 3D result. For video sources it's marked "synced": scrub either side and the other follows, which makes it quick to check that a foot plant or head turn survived the transfer.

Map the bones

The right panel is the core of the mode.

  1. Check "Bone Mapping". The header shows progress as mapped out of total.
  2. Kitly auto-suggests a mapping when you load the rig. Click Auto-map to redo it after changes.
  3. Fix stragglers by hand: each target bone row has a dropdown of source bones. Unassigned rows read as Unmapped.
  4. Leave bones unmapped if the target rig has extras the source doesn't cover (twist bones, props). They keep their rest pose.

Watch the preview as you map. A wrong shoulder assignment is obvious the moment the clip plays.

Name-matching has limits

Auto-map works from bone names and common conventions. Rigs with unusual naming need more hand-mapping. Once it's right, save the map; the next clip onto the same rig is a two-click job.

Smoothing

The Smoothing slider (0 to 100%) softens jitter in the transferred motion. The app notes it's "Baked into the export.", so what you see in the preview at your chosen setting is what the exported clip will contain. Start low; heavy smoothing eats sharp accents like footfalls.

Export

  1. Type a name in the Export section.
  2. Click Export Retargeted Animation.

The confirmation tells you where it went: the new clip is added to the target rig's clip list, so it shows up in the rig's animation channel and plays in the viewer like any other clip. From there it behaves as a normal asset that you can export from the project or feed onward.

A typical mocap-to-rig session

  1. Capture a performance with Mocap; the Body result is a BVH clip.
  2. Open Retarget, set the BVH as the Source Clip and your character as the Target Rig.
  3. Auto-map, patch the leftovers, save the map under the rig's name.
  4. Scrub the synced reference to verify timing against the footage.
  5. Set light smoothing, name it, and click Export Retargeted Animation.