Blender Animation Retargeting moves a performance from one rig to another

What it does, and what it deliberately does not do

This addon enables the transfer of animations and poses from one armature to another.

That is the whole description, and the simplicity is the point. Animation retargeting is the problem of taking a performance captured on one skeleton and replaying it on a different one, and it comes up constantly in production: you animate once on a convenient rig, you deliver on a client's rig, or you reuse a walk cycle across characters of different proportions.

The approach here is the standard one, done inside Blender with no external step. The source armature keeps its animation, the target armature ends up driven by it, and the mapping between the two is defined by you rather than guessed by the tool.

The repository is a Blender extension in the modern layout, with a blender_manifest.toml and an __init__.py at the root, and the logic split into focused modules: alignment.py, baking.py, context.py, corrections.py, drivers.py, ik.py, log.py, main.py, mapping.py, savefile.py and util.py. The names map directly onto the stages of the workflow, which is a good sign for a codebase someone has to maintain.

The default branch is stable rather than main, which is unusual and appropriate for a Blender add-on, since Blender add-ons are distributed as a zip that a user installs and often does not update. The last push was on 2026-08-09, there are no GitHub releases, and the licence is not stated in the repository listing.

Installing it is a zip and a checkbox in preferences

The installation is four steps, and none of them involve a package manager.

Download this repo as a zip. In Blender go to Edit, then Preferences, then Add-ons, then Install. Select the downloaded zip. Then enable the add-on, which will appear in the list.

That last detail is the one that trips people up. Installing an add-on through that dialog does not enable it, and until it is enabled there is no panel and no obvious sign that anything happened. The add-on appears in the list and needs to be ticked.

This is the standard Blender extension workflow, and the fact that the add-on ships as a zip of the repository means you are installing from source unless you are sent a built zip. There is no release to download and no versioning, so the copy you install is whatever the master or stable branch contained when you fetched it.

The add-on does not appear in a generic add-on menu when it is enabled. It appears as a panel on the right side of the 3D View, under a Retarget tab, which is where the workflow begins.

For anyone who maintains a Blender setup across machines, the practical consequence of the zip distribution is that updating means re-downloading and re-installing, and that the version you have is whatever your zip happened to contain.

The workflow is map, align, drive

The usage instructions assume you have both your target and source armature in the scene, and have them aligned and scaled to match each other. That precondition is doing a lot of work, and it is worth understanding why before you start.

Retargeting works by relating a motion on one skeleton to a motion on another. If the two skeletons differ in proportion, the same joint rotation produces a different result on each, and any correspondence you set up has to be expressed in a common frame. Aligning and scaling the two armatures in the viewport is how you establish that common frame, and the add-on uses the alignment you set up as the reference for the rest pose step later.

With that done, the steps are:

Select your target armature and open the add-on panel on the right side of the 3D View, on the Retarget tab. Choose the source armature as Source on the panel. It should say that there are no bone mappings yet, so click Create. Now map each relevant source bone to the corresponding target, making sure to not map any bone multiple times, otherwise you'll get undefined behaviour.

That last warning is the sharp edge. The mapping is a many-to-one relationship by nature, since a source bone maps to exactly one target bone, and mapping one source bone to two targets is not an error the tool catches but produces undefined behaviour. The instructions say to not do it, and they do not say what happens if you do.

Next comes the rest pose alignment. Click on Set up, then change the pose of your target armature in a way that it optimally fits your source armature's rest pose, and when done click Apply. The add-on will then automatically create drivers for each bone, and you should be good to go.

The rest pose step is a manual pose edit rather than an automatic solve, and that is the honest design. Automatically matching two rest poses is a hard problem, and letting the artist nudge the target into a close enough fit is more reliable than a solver that is wrong some of the time.

Foot sliding is handled with an IK setup and a control cube

The correction features exist for one specific problem: foot sliding and odd arm movements caused by anatomical differences between your armatures.

That is the classic retargeting artefact. A character with long legs replaying a walk cycle animated on short legs will have feet that appear to slide along the floor, because the hip rotation that produced a planted foot on the source produces a lifted foot on the target. The joint angles are right and the result is wrong.

Two toggles are offered, Correct Feet Position and Correct Hands Position, and you will be asked to specify the leg and foot bones or the arm and hand bones respectively.

The mechanism is that this will create and IK bone setup for the specified limbs, whereas the target positions for the feet and hands are copied over from the source. The difference in body proportions is therefore absorbed by the IK chain, which adjusts the leg or arm to place the foot where the source put it, rather than by changing the animation.

Additionally it will spawn a control empty cube, that allows you to transform the target positions, and the documentation includes an animated demonstration of that cube in use.

The control empty is the detail that makes the feature usable rather than merely present. An IK correction that lands the foot in the right place but at the wrong height, or slightly off to the side, is still wrong, and the empty gives you a handle to nudge the result into place by hand.

Baking turns the driven result into an ordinary action

Baking is the last step, and it exists because drivers are not always what you want downstream.

For convenience you can bake the source's animation into an action for your target via the add-on, and two options change how that happens.

Linear Interpolation causes the F-Curves between the keyframes to be linearized instead of the default Blender Bezier interpolation. That matters when the source motion is being reproduced faithfully, because Bezier interpolation between two baked keys can overshoot and produce a curve the original did not have.

Bake Mapped Bones Only ensures that target bones that have no retarget mapping will remain unaffected. Without it, baking writes keys for every bone in the target, which overwrites any animation you already had on bones the retarget does not touch. With it, only the mapped bones are written.

The documentation makes a point about doing this by hand instead. Since the target bones are driven by drivers, you can bake everything yourself if you want to, and the advice is to make sure to check Visual Keying if you do so.

That is the underlying reason the add-on uses drivers at all. A driver is a live relationship, so the target follows the source continuously and the artist can keep tweaking the source. Baking is for the moment you want a standalone action, and the option to skip it is for the moment you do not.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this add-on if you work in Blender and need to reuse an animation across two rigs with different bone layouts, because the alternative is reanimating by hand or scripting the copy yourself. Skip it if your rigs share an identical bone structure, since then a plain animation copy is simpler, and if you need a maintained production tool, because the repository has no releases and the licence is not stated. Verify first that your source and target armatures can be placed in the same scene aligned and scaled to match, that you can map each source bone to exactly one target bone, and that you save your file before running the rest pose alignment, since that step rewrites the target rig's pose.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Mwni/blender-animation-retargeting on GitHub
3. README