The First 4 Years of the Mixamo Team’s Journey at Adobe
On June 1st 2015 Adobe acquired Mixamo. This post shares the story of a team and a culture, and offers insight into how things work for a small startup inside a large market leader such as Adobe.
Products
When Mixamo was acquired, the main products were our online animation and rigging service and Fuse, the standalone character creator. The cost for such services was going from $150/mo for All Access to $50/mo and $20/mo for the more limited indie and starter offerings.
With the acquisition by Adobe, all Mixamo services and products were made available for free to the community (like in FREE beer!), including Fuse that rebranded into Adobe Fuse and received a whole new set of high-resolution body scanned 3D models. All products are still available today although Fuse is scheduled for retirement (more below).
On top of that, the Mixamo service was integrated into Photoshop so that people could create a character in Fuse and animate and render it in Photoshop.
Long before we joined the team, Adobe had identified a need in the market for a 2D/3D compositing tool that could render high quality content in 3D. We gathered all the learnings from the 3D features in Photoshop and started developing what is now Adobe Dimension. We needed to start from the foundation. Why have a character creator if you can’t have a tool that can render characters and objects at high-fidelity? CG photorealism is a game changer, but it is also not easy to achieve.
So, we left Fuse alone for a while with just maintenance updates and the whole Mixamo team focused — together with an amazing team of new and veteran Adobe employees — on building Adobe Dimension. Together with Adobe Dimension came Lantern, a whole new Ray Tracer built by Adobe Research, which as you all know is no small effort!
As for Fuse, its characters are not PBR so they would need a full retooling and what we have found over the last few years was that people mostly need “some” characters as opposed to specific ones that are overly customizable. We decided to add a bunch of new ready-to-go characters to Mixamo and retire the existing Adobe Fuse so that we could focus more resources on building the full 3D ecosystem at Adobe. To support that effort Adobe also acquired Allegorithmic in January of this year — I was a board member of the company, huge fan and sponsor of the acquisition — and together we have big plans to really democratize 3D content creation and immersive storytelling.
And what about Mixamo.com? The service continues to grow and is here to stay. There are now 4 times more users than when Mixamo was acquired in 2015. It is powering a whole spectrum of applications from gaming to design to AR experiences (Snap added support for Mixamo animations last year, which helped). All free, and with a more streamlined and scalable interface and backend. Last year, one of the top VFX studios in Hollywood adopted Mixamo for their VFX pre-visualization pipeline for the making of Terminator: Dark Fate — you can imagine how stoked the team was to get such amazing recognition!
We also added a direct export into Adobe Aero so that you can take these beautiful animated characters of yours directly into AR with a single click. More updates on the service will be rolled out early next year, so stay tuned!
Speaking of Adobe Aero, almost three years ago together with Pete Falco (guru of Photoshop 3D) I started a new broad initiative around AR content creation which originated what is today Adobe Aero. The team includes an amazing team of top industry talents in the AR and Immersive space. Aero is now out on mobile and has a desktop version in private beta.
In the process of creating an AR authoring platform we have discovered that the medium can be the Future of Animation Creation. We have shown how in Aero you can animate objects in 3D with just your phone. Our users have found this incredibly intuitive and empowering. We have combined this with the latest technology in mode-adaptive neural network to drive fully automated character controllers as we showed at MAX this year — work by Jun Saito and the prototyping team at Adobe Design — all running in Adobe Aero.
I personally can’t wait to have a lot of these characters out in the wild for you all to enjoy!
Team
The Mixamo team is still at Adobe and thriving. Not a single team member has left in the last 4 years, which is a great testimony to the great respect and culture fit we are enjoying at Adobe. From one of my former CEO’s I learned that culture is everything, as it carries teams and products beyond generations. We would not have all stayed at Adobe if we had not found a great culture of innovation and passion for building creative tools and services.
The original team is still mostly working on Dimension, while some have joined Adobe Aero and the newly formed AR organization I have the privilege of leading — and some are helping out on very future looking imaging products. One more example of the great culture of innovation startups acquired by Adobe enjoy here: the freedom to define the future of the industry.
And what else about the team? A lot of babies! That is also part of growing up and taking more responsibilities, caring for a larger audience, like we do here at Adobe where we affect the lives of millions of people, and we do not take it lightly! We also kept the scrappy and fearless startup spirit of the San Francisco dog patch area, as in fact we only moved a few blocks from our original office and we keep the same open space layout we thrived in.
Something about the future
It is going to take a village to democratize 3D, and we are really passionate about it. We just need to tackle the right piece at the right time. With Allegorithmic joining Adobe, we have added more of that rebel problem solving DNA — as my friend Sébastien calls it — to the cause. In fact, we have added 140 more rebels that joined forces with us and help achieve that mission. We can’t succeed without you all and the trust and support from the community really makes a difference in our daily work life. We are only human, and feeling understood by the community we serve in only propels us further.
