Meshcapade
Meshcapade turns ordinary video into markerless motion capture and rigged 3D avatars, built on the SMPL body model it invented. Now part of Epic Games, its online platforms have been shut down and are no longer available.
What is Meshcapade?
Meshcapade is a 3D human toolkit that brings motion capture, motion generation and body understanding together in one place. Its pitch is blunt: no suits, no markers, one camera. Feed it video from a phone, a webcam or a professional rig, static or handheld, and it returns a rigged 3D character with full-body motion and detailed finger articulation, for one performer or several, along with the camera's own 3D trajectory.
Underneath sits SMPL, the Skinned Multi-Person Linear Model, which the founding team created at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. SMPL is a parametric body model trained on hundreds of thousands of 3D and 4D scans, compressing body shape, pose, soft-tissue motion, expressions and hand articulation into roughly a hundred parameters. The patent belongs to the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, and Meshcapade holds an exclusive licence with the right to sub-license. The original paper is the third most cited in the history of ACM Transactions on Graphics and won a Seminal Papers award in 2023.
Two products sit on top. MoCapade handles capture: video in, a rigged animation file out in GLB, FBX or the SMPL format. Its underlying model, PromptHMR, was published at CVPR and ICCV in 2025 and is patent pending. MoGen handles generation, producing real-time reactive behaviour, while a Motion from Text feature turns a written description into usable movement.
The company aimed all of this at three verticals: animation and games, where studios want realistic avatars and non-player characters; fashion, where accurate body twins drive virtual try-on and size recommendation; and robotics, where labelled synthetic humans train perception and safety systems. Deployment was offered in the cloud, on-premise or hybrid, with an API and claimed compatibility with Unreal Engine, Roblox and Fortnite.
One thing overrides all of it. The homepage now reads Meshcapade is now part of Epic Games, and states that the online platforms were shut down on 18 April. Visitors are pointed to unrealengine.com to follow Epic's digital human work. The technology described here is real and thoroughly documented, but it is no longer something you can sign up for.
What it does
- Capture full-body and finger motion from a single video, with no suit and no markers
- Generate a realistic 3D avatar from a photo, video, 3D scan, body measurements or a text description
- Track camera movement alongside the performers and export the 3D camera trajectory
- Generate motion from a text prompt, or real-time reactive behaviour with MoGen
- Export rigged animation as GLB, FBX, MP4 or SMPL for game engines and DCC software
- Produce large labelled synthetic datasets with keypoints, masks, depth and contact for model training
- Derive digital body measurements for size recommendation and made-to-measure garments
When to use Meshcapade / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Meshcapade is the right fit.
When to use Meshcapade
- Game studios building realistic player avatars and non-player characters with diverse body types
- Animation and VFX teams that need rigged character motion from ordinary video, without suits or a mocap stage
- Fashion and e-commerce teams working on virtual try-on, size recommendation and digital sampling
- Robotics engineers who need labelled synthetic humans for perception, teleoperation and workcell ergonomics
- Computer vision and machine learning researchers who already work with the SMPL body model
When not to use Meshcapade
- Anyone who needs a working tool today, since the online platforms were shut down on 18 April
- Teams that must budget before committing, because no pricing was ever published
- Anyone under 18, who is explicitly excluded from the service by the privacy policy
- Users looking for a mobile app, as neither an iOS nor an Android app is offered
- Studios wanting ready-made stylised game avatars rather than the body and motion layer underneath them
How to use Meshcapade
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Note first that the online platforms were shut down on 18 April, so the steps below describe the workflow as the site documents it, not something you can run today
- Create an account and give the explicit consent requested during sign-up before any sensitive data is processed
- Choose an input: a photo, a video, a 3D scan, a set of body measurements or a text description
- Upload video from any camera, whether a phone, a webcam or a professional rig, static or handheld
- Let MoCapade estimate body shape, full-body motion and finger articulation, for one person or several
- Add camera motion tracking when the shot was filmed handheld or on a moving rig
- Type a description instead of filming if you want Motion from Text rather than captured movement
- Download the rigged result in GLB, FBX, MP4 or the SMPL format
- Drop the file into your game engine or DCC software, or map the measurements to your brand size chart for fashion work
- For volume or automation, call the documented API, or discuss a cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Built by the inventors of SMPL, the de facto standard for representing 3D humans, held under an exclusive licence
- No suit, no markers and no studio: one ordinary camera is enough, even a handheld phone
- Outputs land directly in existing pipelines through FBX and GLB
- Backed by published research, including PromptHMR and an ACM Transactions on Graphics Seminal Papers award in 2023
- Production use claimed in AAA games, robotics, apparel and healthcare
- Serious privacy posture for a tool handling biometrics: consent-based training, named processors, a SOC 2 badge
- European company, with hosting contracted through the Luxembourg entity of AWS
Cons
- The online platforms have been shut down, so nothing can be used self-service
- No pricing was ever published, and the site has no pricing page at all
- The terms of service render only in JavaScript, hiding output ownership, refunds and governing law
- No customer-facing data processing agreement could be found
- No native mobile app for iOS or Android
- API documentation exists, but its body is JavaScript-rendered and unreadable without a browser
- No interface language other than English is documented, and no data hosting country is named
Pricing & Plans
Meshcapade never published a price. The privacy policy states that services were offered either as a fee-based subscription or free of charge, and mentions a free trial phase that converts into a paid subscription unless it is cancelled in time. The SMPL page described the motion capture product as live and free for testing. No amount, currency or billing unit appears anywhere on the site, and the question is now moot: the online platforms have been shut down.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Meshcapade handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is concrete and specific. Meshcapade GmbH names itself as controller, gives security@meshcapade.com as its privacy contact, and its policy, last updated on 15 March 2024, is structured article by article: rights under Articles 7(3), 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21 and 77, with the restrictions of section 34 BDSG flagged. The competent supervisory authority is named as the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Wurttemberg. Article 28 agreements are said to be in place with every processor, and six processors are listed by name. Transfers to the United States rely on the adequacy decision of 10 July 2023. The homepage claims to be EU/GDPR compliant, and a SOC 2 badge sits in the footer, though no audit report or date is published.
Who owns the data?
Meshcapade GmbH acts as the data controller under the GDPR for everything processed through its websites and services. The photos, videos, 3D scans, measurements and text you upload remain your personal data, and are converted into the statistical parameters that form your avatar. Because that material can reveal ethnic origin, religious belief, sexual orientation, health or biometric traits, the company treats it as special-category data under Article 9 and processes it only with express, revocable consent. An account and the avatar it holds are deleted after three years of inactivity. The terms of service render only in JavaScript, so the clause covering ownership of generated outputs could not be verified.
Reuse rights
Nothing in the collected pages grants the end user an explicit right to reuse Meshcapade's own material without permission, and the terms of service could not be read in static form, so no licence terms are confirmed. What is documented is the opposite direction: uploaded material was used as training data to develop, test and improve the AI systems, but only where the user had expressly consented, and that consent could be withdrawn at any time by writing to support@meshcapade.com. Data was otherwise processed to create avatars, manage accounts, handle billing through Stripe, answer contact requests and send newsletters. The policy states that no automated decision-making or profiling takes place.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Meshcapade processes personal data on Amazon Web Services infrastructure, contracted through Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Luxembourg under an Article 28 agreement. The policy warns that data may also reach the US parent, Amazon Inc. in Seattle. Five further processors are named: Stripe, with Stripe Payments Europe in Dublin handling EU customers; HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Google Ireland in Dublin; Box.com (UK) in London; and Slack Technologies in San Francisco. Transfers to the United States rest on the European Commission adequacy decision of 10 July 2023 under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. What the site never does is name a country or region where data is actually stored, so no hosting jurisdiction can be stated with certainty. Private or regional deployment was offered as a commercial option to fashion customers. The website itself resolves to an Amazon CloudFront node, which reflects content delivery rather than where user data lives.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Meshcapade.
- The service is gone: the platforms were shut down on 18 April and Meshcapade now belongs to Epic Games, so anything built around it needs a replacement
- Uploaded photos and videos can amount to special-category data under Article 9 of the GDPR, covering biometrics, health and ethnic origin, which is a heavier exposure than an ordinary file upload
- Your material could be used as training data; it required express consent, but consent clicked through quickly at sign-up is easy to forget you ever gave
- An account and the avatars inside it are deleted after three years of inactivity, so an archive left untouched can simply disappear
- The terms of service never render without JavaScript, which means nobody can read who owns the generated avatars before agreeing to them
- The SOC 2 badge in the footer carries no report and no audit date, and a badge is not a certification you can lean on
- A body twin is a likeness: making one of someone else, or reusing one after a project ends, raises consent questions the site does not answer
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Capture itself was meant to be easy: upload a video, get a rigged file back, through a browser-based flow that fashion customers could complete in under a minute without installing anything. Everything after that assumes a technical team, whether mapping FBX or GLB into a game engine or DCC pipeline, calling the API, or standing up a cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment. In practice the question is moot: with the online platforms shut down, there is no setup left to attempt.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Meshcapade
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does Meshcapade actually do?
Can I still use Meshcapade?
What is SMPL?
Do I need a motion capture suit or a studio?
What formats does it export?
Is there an API?
What did it cost?
Was my data used to train the models?
Is there an age limit?
Where was the data hosted?
Should you pick Meshcapade?
Meshcapade was infrastructure rather than a consumer product. Where most avatar companies build stylised characters by hand, Meshcapade built the layer underneath: a body model precise enough to be shared between a game engine, a clothing brand and a robotics lab, so that all three could describe the same human in the same terms. The company's own FAQ compares it to the PDF, a format everyone eventually agreed on. That ambition is what made SMPL the de facto standard in industry and academia alike, and the research record behind it is unusually strong for a startup.
The practical work was equally credible. Markerless capture from a single handheld camera, finger articulation, camera tracking, exports that drop straight into FBX and GLB pipelines: these are the details that decide whether a studio adopts a tool, and the site documents them concretely rather than in slogans. The privacy posture was serious too, which matters more here than for most tools, because the input is somebody's body.
The verdict in 2026 is nonetheless short. Meshcapade is now part of Epic Games and its online platforms have been shut down. There is no sign-up, no trial, no published pricing and no roadmap left to evaluate. What remains is worth knowing for a different reason: SMPL did not disappear with the company, it is still the representation most 3D human research is built on, and the site now points to unrealengine.com for whatever comes next.
Treat this entry as a record rather than a recommendation. If you are shopping for markerless motion capture, look for a vendor that is still trading. If you work with 3D humans at all, the SMPL page remains one of the clearest explanations of why a parametric body model matters.
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