How to Rig a Character for Godot 4 and Retarget Humanoid Animations

What Godot needs from a humanoid rig

Godot plays an animation by bone path, so two skeletons share clips only when their bone names and rest poses agree. The importer fixes both for you: a BoneMap says which of your bones is which humanoid bone, and the Rest Fixer brings the bone rests in line with Godot’s reference pose (a T-pose facing +Z with Y up); an A-pose rig needs one extra option for that, below. The built-in profile for people is SkeletonProfileHumanoid: 56 bones, 17 of them required.

Three ways to get the rig

• •Blender by hand: build an armature, skin the mesh, export glTF. Naming the bones like the profile (Hips, LeftUpperArm and so on) saves mapping work later; any other names can be mapped by hand in Godot.
• •An auto-rigger with its own skeleton (Mixamo, AccuRIG): Godot’s auto-mapping matches common bone names by pattern when you pick the profile, and you fix any gap by hand. We have not tested these files in Godot ourselves.
• •RigMaster (ours): upload a GLB, place guide markers, rig (15 credits), then download Other engines > Godot glTF. The file uses SkeletonProfileHumanoid’s bone names. This is the route we tested below.

Step by step: import and set the bone map

In our test RigMaster’s Godot file had 52 bones and every one of them was a profile bone with the profile’s own parent: all 17 required bones mapped, 52 of 56 in total. The four left empty were Root, LeftEye, RightEye and Jaw, which are optional. We built the map by bone name in a script rather than with the editor’s auto-mapping; if the editor ever leaves one of them empty, pick the bone of the same name from the list.

• •Copy the .glb into your Godot 4 project folder. Godot imports it on its own.
• •Double-click the file to open Advanced Import Settings and select the Skeleton3D node.
• •Under Retarget, set Bone Map to New BoneMap, then set its Profile to New SkeletonProfileHumanoid. Any missing or wrong bone shows as a magenta or red button.
• •Under Rest Fixer, turn on Fix Silhouette if the rig rests in an A-pose (a RigMaster rig does: it rests in Manny’s A-pose). Leave the other Rest Fixer options at their defaults.
• •Click Reimport. The skeleton is renamed to a unique node, %GeneralSkeleton, which is the path every retargeted clip will use.

Step by step: play animations from another rig

We used Quaternius’ Universal Animation Library (CC0, a T-pose rig with Unreal-style bone names and 43 clips) and played Idle, Walk, Jog, Sprint, Dance, a jab, a sword attack and a seated idle on the character. With Fix Silhouette on, the arm segments followed the source within 1 degree in every clip and the leg segments within 3.2 degrees.

• •Copy the animation file into the project and give its Skeleton3D the same two settings: a BoneMap with SkeletonProfileHumanoid, mapped to that rig’s own bone names. Turn on Fix Silhouette only if that rig is also in an A-pose.
• •In the Import dock, set Import As to Animation Library and reimport. Its tracks now point at %GeneralSkeleton with the profile’s bone names.
• •Open your character’s scene, add an AnimationPlayer whose root is the character, and load the animation file as a library (Animation > Manage Animations > Load Library).
• •Pick a clip and press play.

Why Fix Silhouette decides whether it looks right

Retargeting carries each bone’s rotation from one rig to the other, measured from the rest pose. When the source rests in a T-pose and your character in an A-pose, every frame keeps that difference. Without Fix Silhouette our character’s arms sat 55 to 61 degrees off the source in every clip, enough to push the hands through the hips in an idle. With it, the character’s rest was turned to the T-pose and the arms matched. Godot’s own documentation says the same: the option is not needed for T-pose models but should be enabled for A-pose models.

Two offsets stayed in place in every frame, so they are part of the rig’s shape, not of the motion: the shoulder bone points 38 to 51 degrees differently from the source’s collarbone, and the toes 31 degrees. Godot’s documentation notes that Fix Silhouette can leave the feet looking off on some models and suggests adding foot bones to its filter; we did not need it for the clips we played, and we did not test the filter.

What we tested, and the limits

• •Tested: Godot 4.7.2 stable on macOS, one RigMaster character with whole-hand rigs and one with separate fingers, one CC0 animation library, clips without root motion. Retargeted finger bones followed the source within about 3 degrees.
• •Not tested: Mixamo or AccuRIG files, root motion (RigMaster’s Godot file has no Root bone, so motion stored on a source’s Root bone has no bone to land on), Godot versions before 4.7, Windows and Linux.
• •Skin weights: the Godot file keeps the 4 strongest bone weights per vertex, where the Unreal FBX keeps up to 8. On the poses we rendered we could not see a difference, but a low-poly mesh can bend a little differently at the joints than it does in Unreal.
• •Rig quality carries over. A weak spot in the rig (for example clothing weighted to a hand) shows in Godot the same way it would in Unreal; RigMaster’s grade and free polish rounds are where to fix it.
• •Humanoids only. Godot’s humanoid profile, Mixamo and RigMaster all assume two arms and two legs; anything else is rigged by hand.

Sources

• •Godot documentation: Retargeting 3D Skeletons: Bone Map, SkeletonProfileHumanoid, Rest Fixer and Fix Silhouette; read November 1, 2026
• •Quaternius: Universal Animation Library: the CC0 clips used in the test