Mixamo FBX in Blender 5: Fix T-Pose, Scale and Bone Errors

A Mixamo FBX imports into Blender without an error and still comes out wrong, and the fix starts with knowing which importer you are using. On Blender 5.x the default importer offers one armature option, Ignore Leaf Bones. The options every older guide tells you to set, Automatic Bone Orientation, Force Connect Children and Apply Transform, belong to the legacy FBX add-on. Pick the importer first, then check the 0.01 scale before you touch anything else.

Which importer you are using

Blender 5.0 made a new C++ FBX importer the default and deprecated the Python one, which stays available, according to the Blender 5.0 Pipeline and I/O release notes. The old Mixamo add-ons sit on top of that change:

Route	Works on	What it gives you
Adobe's Mixamo add-on	Blender 3.6	One-click import and control rig. Per one 2026 guide, it stopped working on 4.x when bone layers became bone collections
Mixamo Rig extension 1.2.2	Listed for 4.2 LTS; its page marks 5.5 and above unsupported	A one-click IK control rig and baking to and from it
Manual import, new importer	Blender 5.0 and later	Ignore Leaf Bones only, under Armature
Manual import, legacy add-on	Older releases, and still in 5.x	Ignore Leaf Bones, Force Connect Children, Automatic Bone Orientation, Apply Transform

Read from Blender's own import operators, Blender 5.1.2 lists FBX (.fbx), the new importer, and FBX (.fbx) (Legacy) under File > Import. Blender 4.5.2 flips them: FBX (.fbx) is the legacy add-on and the new importer is FBX (.fbx) (experimental). The new importer's options are Scale, Ignore Leaf Bones, animation and material settings. Only the legacy one has Force Connect Children, Automatic Bone Orientation and Apply Transform.

What the manual says about the options, and what it does not

The Blender 5.2 manual's FBX page documents Ignore Leaf Bones, which drops the extra bone at the end of each chain that marks the previous bone's length. It also says each FBX take imports as its own action, with every animated object in its own slot.

The 4.5 manual's page for the legacy add-on lists Force Connect Children, Automatic Bone Orientation and Apply Transform, then leaves each one as a TODO to add the information. What they do comes from community guides, so treat this as their advice, not Blender's. KatsBits' Mixamo import fix turns on Ignore Leaf Bones, Force Connect Children and Automatic Bone Orientation, and explains that Mixamo skeletons use the hips as the root bone instead of one on the ground. Cinevva's 2026 guide adds that Apply Transform should stay off, since it misbehaves with armatures and animation.

Four failures that raise no error

1. The character stands in a T-pose. The action is not assigned to the armature, or the bone names do not match. Mixamo names bones mixamorig:Hips, so an action that uses mixamorig1: or a stripped prefix fails silently. Check the Action Editor's dropdown first, then use Batch Rename (Ctrl+F2) to fix the prefix.
2. The character flies away. Mixamo files typically carry a 0.01 scale on the armature and 100 on the child mesh. Apply scale to one armature and not another, and the location keys stay in centimeters while the skeleton expects meters. Keep 0.01 everywhere, or apply it to every armature before you move any action.
3. The bones point the wrong way. Importing without bone orientation correction leaves odd bone rolls. Playback looks fine, but constraints and retargeting break, so re-import instead of patching the rolls by hand.
4. The textures are pink or gray. Pink means the image paths are broken (File > External Data > Find Missing Files). Gray usually means the texture node is not wired to Base Color.

These four are reported by Cinevva's guide, KatsBits and community threads. The importer options above were read from Blender itself.

Import the character once, then the clips

The pattern that keeps files small: download the character once with skin, then every animation without skin, at FBX binary and 30 fps. GameFromScratch's walkthrough shows the import. Each clip then carries only the skeleton and the motion. Stack the clips as strips in the NLA editor. If a walk should loop, the walk-cycle post has the two steps, and it depends on how you exported the clip.

Adobe's Mixamo FAQ, last updated in 2021, says Mixamo is free with an Adobe ID, needs no Creative Cloud subscription, allows royalty-free commercial use, and works for bipedal humanoids only. It keeps only the last character you used, so save rigged characters locally. Once a clip is in, the walk-cycle troubleshooting article covers sliding feet, snap-back and In Place, and the retargeting article covers putting a clip on your own rig.