I started building pipeline tools for my Babylon game dev workflow about a year ago, mostly as a way to teach myself everything from terraforming to animation. A few months ago I had a breakthrough in my engineering approach. I built an animation and armature pipeline tool to help new users who want to use generative AI models, but who find native animation tools complex and inconsistent.
At its core is a kernel that handles retargeting and enhancement quickly and reliably across several animation standards: Mixamo, BVH, Second Life .anim and glTF. That became Harry, a name that tips its hat to the history of animation and armatures. Harry is a practical tool for getting from a genAI model to a well-animated avatar, and it tries to make that trip quick and easy.
The video above shows how I enable model upload into pOqpOq.com, and how Harry fits into that flow.
What goes in: GLB or VRM avatars.
- Tripo: the most heavily tested. Harry accepts every Tripo rig preset: Tripo’s default rig, ActorCore, Mixamo, UE5 Mannequin, Unity and VRM 1.0.
- Meshy: supported, but not as heavily vetted as Tripo yet.
- VRoid (
.vrm) and Mixamo-rigged characters exported as GLB. - Mixamo FBX clips work as animation sources, and Mixamo characters will load without animation as models.
What Harry adds:
- Hand and finger bones for models that arrive without them
- Elbows and knees that bend where they should, with creases and muscle swell on the bend
- Chest volume that holds when the arms move, instead of caving in
- Tail rigging with a wag, plus bounce for hair and jiggle for soft tissue (chest, stomach, booty)
A note for Babylon folks: the rig, the fingers, the morph targets and the baked clips are standard glTF, so they’ll load in any Babylon scene. The live physics (tail wag, hair bounce and jiggle) is stored as data inside the GLB, and right now only pOqpOq World runs it. In your own scene, those parts will sit still until something reads that data. If there’s interest, I’d be glad to share a Babylon reader for it.
You can find Harry here: poqpoq.com/harry. It’s in beta, which means it’s free and online. Please keep a backup of your original model. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
— Allen