Mixamo Walk Cycle in Blender: Fix Sliding and Snap-Back

Pick one thing to move your character. If the Mixamo clip should carry the character forward, download it without In Place and loop it with Repeat with Offset. If a game engine, a path or your own empty does the moving, download it In Place. Sliding feet, snap-back and endless walking on the spot are what you get when both move it, or neither does.

Which Mixamo walk to download

Start from the Mixamo download dialog, where the In Place checkbox decides who owns the forward motion. Guides for Blender and other engines describe the same checkbox and the same rule of thumb.

What moves the character	Download	Why
The clip itself, in a Blender render	Without In Place	The hips travel, so a looped clip keeps walking across the scene
A follow-path constraint or a parent empty	In Place	The path supplies the travel; the clip only supplies the steps
A game engine's locomotion system	In Place	The engine moves the capsule; a second source of motion adds to its speed

For everything you download, the guides agree on FBX binary at 30 fps, and "Without Skin" for every clip after the first: the character comes down once with its skin, and each clip after that carries only the skeleton and the motion.

Adobe's Mixamo FAQ, last updated in 2021, covers the terms and not the checkbox. It says Mixamo is free with an Adobe ID, needs no Creative Cloud subscription, and allows royalty-free use of its characters and animations in personal, commercial and non-profit projects. The download settings above come from the guides.

Why the walk snaps back at the end of the loop

If the character walks one stride and jumps back to where it began, the loop is repeating without offset. Repeat Motion copies the curve unchanged, so every cycle starts from the same position. Repeat with Offset shifts each copy so its first keyframe matches the previous copy's last one, and the forward motion adds up. In a test on Blender 4.5.2 and 5.1.2, a curve keyed from 0 at frame 1 to 1 at frame 10 with a Cycles modifier set to Repeat Motion came back to the same 0.444 at frames 14, 23, 32 and 59 that it had at frame 5, so the character returns to the same spot each cycle. Set to Repeat with Offset, the same frames gave 1.444, 2.444, 3.444 and 6.444. The modes are in the Blender manual's F-Curve Modifiers page, under the Cycles modifier's Before and After modes, and both Blender versions add the modifier from the Extrapolation menu as Make Cyclic (F-Modifier).

The two-step version, Make Cyclic and then Repeat with Offset, is in the original walk-cycle post. It only works on a clip downloaded without In Place. An In Place clip has no travel for the offset to add up.

Turn a root-motion walk into an In Place walk

Say you already have the traveling version and need it to stay put. The Graph Editor can flatten the travel. The Blender manual's Editing F-Curves page covers the snap tools.

Select the armature and open the Graph Editor.
Find the hips bone's location curves and pick the one carrying the forward travel. Scrub the timeline and watch which curve changes as the character advances.
Select its keys and use Key > Snap > Selection to Cursor Value, with the Graph Editor's cursor at the value you want the hips to hold. That command exists under that name in Blender 4.5.2 and 5.1.2.

That is the method people describe on the Adobe Mixamo forum. A paid add-on, In Placer, automates it, and one Blender Artists thread reports root motion refusing to come out in Auto-Rig Pro, so check the result by scrubbing the timeline before trusting either.

Why the feet slide, and what fixes it

Feet slide when the speed the character travels and the speed the legs imply do not match. Mixamo clips are baked, with a key on every bone on every frame, so there is no handful of keys to nudge. Two fixes work without touching the keys:

Scale the strip in the NLA editor. Put the walk on an action strip and change its scale until the stride matches the distance covered. Blender's Nonlinear Animation manual covers strips and their properties.
Add an animation layer that carries only the forward motion, and let the clip's own forward travel go. This approach turns up in Blender community threads for a character that follows a path or must change speed.

Both can only reduce the slide. The paid Foot Flow add-on is built for the job: its documentation says it fixes foot sliding, jitter and ground contact and works with Mixamo clips.

One possible cause is the frame rate. Mixamo clips come down at 30 fps, and a Blender scene may be set to something else, which changes the pace of the steps without changing the distance. Set the scene to match before adjusting anything else.

Blend idle, walk and run in the NLA

A step-by-step guide to blending Mixamo clips walks through idle to walk to run in the NLA editor. The short version:

Import the clips and rename each action so you can tell them apart.
Delete the duplicate armatures Mixamo's files bring with them, and keep one.
Push each action down into an action strip in the NLA editor.
Set Blend In on the strip that follows, so the change is a few frames rather than a snap.

The strip on top wins where two overlap, a pitfall the guide flags when a clip never seems to play.

Where this goes wrong

The character is frozen in a T-pose. The action is not assigned, or the bone names do not match. Fix that before anything above.
The walk is fast or slow after import. Check the frame rate first, then the strip scale.
It looks right in the Graph Editor and wrong in the viewport. The pose cycles correctly while the position resets, which means the offset is missing.

For the import settings that come first, see Mixamo FBX in Blender 5. To put a clip on your own rig, or to skip Mixamo, see Mixamo retargeting and its alternatives.