DeepMotion
DeepMotion turns ordinary video or a written prompt into full-body 3D character animation directly in a browser, with no suits or cameras, and exports the result as FBX, BVH, GLB or MP4 for game engines.
What is DeepMotion?
DeepMotion is a browser-based platform that produces 3D character animation with artificial intelligence instead of a motion capture stage. The company, DeepMotion, Inc., is based in San Mateo, California, and its About page traces the work back to 2014, combining physics simulation, AI-powered motion capture and real-time body tracking.
Two products sit on the platform. Animate 3D is the capture side. It takes an ordinary MP4, MOV or AVI file, filmed on a phone, pulled from an archive or found online, and reconstructs full-body movement from it, markerless, with no suit, no rig and no dedicated camera. A single clip can carry up to eight people, and the system adds face tracking, hand tracking, physics simulation, foot locking, hand-to-ground contact and motion smoothing. When the result drifts, the patent-pending Rotoscope Pose Editor lets the user trace the movement directly over the source video and correct joints frame by frame.
SayMotion, launched in November 2023 under its earlier name MotionGPT, is the generative side. A written prompt becomes a 3D animation, and an inpainting tool extends, blends or reworks sequences instead of pulling them from a stock library.
Characters are flexible. Users upload their own FBX, GLB or VRM models, build avatars through the embedded Ready Player Me and Avaturn creators, or take the default cast; motion is retargeted automatically onto whichever is chosen. Output leaves in FBX, BVH, MP4 or GLB and drops into Blender, Maya, iClone, Unity, Unreal Engine, Roblox or MetaHuman Creator, all listed as companion tools.
Usage is metered in credits: one credit buys one second of animation or one 3D pose, with face and hand tracking each adding half a credit. Two REST APIs exist for automation, the Animate 3D REST API and a SayMotion API currently limited to verified partners, both with public repositories on GitHub. The stated ambition is to build the largest AI-generated 3D animation platform and democratise digital human motion, aimed at games, film, VR, AR, social media and the metaverse.
What it does
- Turn any video into full-body 3D character animation
- Generate 3D animation from a written text prompt
- Track up to eight people at once from a single camera
- Capture face and hand movement alongside the body
- Retarget motion automatically onto a custom or default character
- Correct joints frame by frame in the Rotoscope Pose Editor
- Export to FBX, BVH, GLB or MP4 for Blender, Maya, Unity or Unreal
When to use DeepMotion / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if DeepMotion is the right fit.
When to use DeepMotion
- Indie game developers who need volumes of character animation without booking a mocap stage
- 3D animators prototyping motion from phone footage or archive video
- Storyboard artists and previz teams testing scenes before a production commits
- XR, metaverse and virtual production studios populating worlds with NPC and crowd motion
- Educators and researchers teaching or studying human movement on a limited budget
When not to use DeepMotion
- Businesses wanting a commercial licence at zero cost, since the free tier is personal use only
- Teams that must approve a price before signing up, as no rate is published anywhere on the site
- Organisations under strict EU data rules, given the absence of any GDPR, DPA or Article 27 commitment
- Mobile-first users expecting a native iOS or Android app rather than a browser workflow
- Developers wanting open SayMotion API access, which is restricted to verified partners
How to use DeepMotion
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create a free account from the sign-up page; no credit card is requested
- Log in to the portal at portal.deepmotion.com and open Animate 3D
- Click Create to start a new job and upload your MP4, MOV or AVI clip
- Pick a character: your own FBX, GLB or VRM model, a Ready Player Me or Avaturn avatar, or a default one
- Switch on the options you need, from face and hand tracking to physics simulation, foot locking and motion smoothing
- Let the job process, respecting the capture guidelines so the source video gives a usable result
- Open the Rotoscope Pose Editor and correct any joint that tracked badly
- Optionally describe the motion in up to 256 characters to earn animation credits back
- Export the animation as FBX, BVH, GLB or MP4 into your 3D software
- For text-driven work, open SayMotion instead, type a prompt and refine the result with inpainting
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No hardware at all: no suit, no dedicated camera, no studio space
- Runs entirely in a browser, on any device
- Permanent free account with sixty seconds of animation a month and no credit card
- Credits can be earned back through the Free Animation Credit Program
- Industry-standard exports drop straight into Blender, Maya, Unity and Unreal
- Users keep full ownership of uploaded content, and uploads stay private
- Two documented REST APIs with public repositories on GitHub
Cons
- No price is readable anywhere on the site; the plan tables are rendered in JavaScript
- The free tier forbids commercial use, so any professional output requires a paid plan
- Credits expire every month and never carry over, even on annual billing
- The Studio plan's unlimited credits drop to low job priority past 7,200 a month
- Face and hand tracking each cost an extra half credit per second of animation
- No GDPR mention, no data processing agreement and no EU representative in the legal pages
- SayMotion API access is closed to anyone who is not a verified partner
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available. Named Freemium, it requires no credit card, does not expire, and allows up to sixty seconds of animation each month, strictly for personal, non-commercial use. Paid subscriptions exist and are identified in the Terms of Use as Starter, Innovator, Professional, Studio and Enterprise, a commercial licence being conditional on holding one of them. No entry price can be quoted here: the pricing tables on all three pricing pages are rendered in JavaScript, and no amount appears in the pages as served. Prospective buyers must therefore create an account, or contact the sales team, to obtain a figure.
- free
- no credit card
- never expires
- 60 seconds of animation per month
- personal and non-commercial use only
- paid subscription named in the Terms of Use
- amount not published
- paid subscription named in the Terms of Use
- amount not published
- paid subscription named in the Terms of Use
- amount not published
- paid subscription with unlimited credits
- the first 7
- 200 each month at highest job priority and the remainder at low priority
- amount not published
- paid subscription named in the Terms of Use
- amount not published
- dedicated high-volume plans arranged through Contact Sales
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how DeepMotion handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no GDPR mention at all. Across the sixteen pages collected, privacy policy, terms of use, support and contact pages included, the words GDPR and General Data Protection Regulation do not appear once. No data processing agreement is published or offered, no Article 27 representative is designated for the European Union, and no data protection officer is named. The privacy policy, last updated on 1 December 2023, does identify a controller, DEEPMOTION, INC. at 400 Concar Drive, San Mateo, CA 94402, and routes personal data questions to support@deepmotion.com. It also asks European users to consent to their information being transferred to the United States, citing neither standard contractual clauses nor any adequacy mechanism. The compliance framework the company does invoke is American: COPPA, for users under thirteen.
Who owns the data?
DeepMotion's Terms of Use are unusually clear on this point: the user keeps full ownership of every video, 3D model and contribution uploaded, and the company states that it claims no ownership over any of it. Uploads stay private, are never published, and cannot be reached by other Animate 3D users. What the plan governs is not ownership but licensing. Animations produced under the Freemium tier carry a personal, non-commercial licence only, while a paid subscription grants a perpetual commercial licence. Credits earned free through the labelling programme change nothing here: the licence follows the plan, never the method used to pay for the animation.
Reuse rights
Reuse of the user's own material needs no permission from DeepMotion. Ownership stays with the uploader, and the company grants itself only the limited rights required to operate the service. What changes with the plan is the right to exploit the finished animation. Under Freemium the licence is explicitly confined to hobbyists, students and non-commercial work; the paid tiers named in the terms, Starter, Innovator, Professional, Studio and Enterprise, carry a perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid licence covering commercial release. Animations obtained with free credits are treated identically. On DeepMotion's side, uploaded content is processed to deliver the service, and text labels submitted voluntarily to the Free Animation Credit Program feed a proprietary scoring model.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Data is stored and processed in the United States and, in the privacy policy's own wording, in any other country where DeepMotion, its subsidiaries, affiliates or service providers keep facilities. No region choice is offered to the user. The subprocessor list is published, which is worth noting: Google, Inc. supplies cloud infrastructure and hosts user data in the United States, while SendGrid handles marketing email, OKTA handles authentication and identification, and Citrix Podio holds project and customer relationship data across the United States and Denmark. Cross-border transfer is explicit rather than implied, since European users are asked to accept that their information may move to a jurisdiction whose data protection law differs from their own. Security is described only as commercially reasonable safeguards, with a unique password requested at login. No certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is claimed anywhere on the site, and no encryption standard is stated. The company undertakes to investigate and to notify affected individuals in the event of a breach.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting DeepMotion.
- Ownership is clear but licensing is not intuitive: producing paid work on a free account breaches the terms
- Uploading video of other people raises consent questions the platform leaves entirely to you
- The likeness and movement of real performers can be captured from any found footage, with obvious ethical and legal exposure
- No documented way to exclude your material from model training, while voluntary labelling explicitly feeds a proprietary model
- Data is held in the United States, with cross-border transfers you are asked to consent to
- Contractual liability is capped at 500 USD, a low ceiling against any production incident
- Leaning on generated motion can erode the observational craft animators build by working by hand
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Getting started is easy. Nothing to install, a browser is the only requirement, and a free account opens without a credit card. A first animation is minutes away: upload, pick a character, set the options, export. Two caveats. Cookies must be enabled, and browser auto-translate plugins break the login. And the real difficulty sits downstream rather than in the tool: importing FBX or BVH, retargeting and cleaning up inside Blender, Maya, Unity or Unreal assumes genuine 3D skills. API use is a development project of its own, with access granted on request.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind DeepMotion
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What can I feed into DeepMotion?
Which formats can I export?
Is the free plan genuinely free?
How much does a paid plan cost?
How are credits counted?
Can I sell the animations I produce?
Who owns the videos I upload?
Is there an API?
How old must I be to use it?
Should you pick DeepMotion?
DeepMotion answers a narrow but real problem: character animation has always been gated by equipment, and this platform removes the gate. A phone clip and a browser are enough to obtain full-body motion data, and a written sentence is enough to generate movement from nothing. For an independent creator, a small studio or a university department, that shift is substantial.
The execution is solid where it matters technically. Exports are industry standard, the companion tool list covers the software people actually use, the Rotoscope Pose Editor acknowledges that AI capture drifts and offers a way to fix it, and the ownership terms are unambiguous: uploaded content stays the user's, and uploads stay private. Two REST APIs with public repositories make the platform something to build on rather than merely use.
The reservations are commercial and legal rather than technical. Not one price appears anywhere on the site, because all three pricing pages assemble their tables in JavaScript, so a buyer cannot budget without opening an account. The free tier, generous in principle at sixty seconds a month with no card required, is closed to any commercial work. Credits vanish at the end of each month, annual billing included, and the Studio plan's unlimited is qualified by a priority drop past 7,200 credits. Most notably, the legal pages never mention the GDPR, publish no data processing agreement, name no European representative and document no way to keep your material out of model training, while asking European users to consent to transfers to the United States.
DeepMotion is therefore easy to recommend for experimentation, teaching, prototyping and independent production, and harder to recommend to an organisation with procurement rules or European data obligations to satisfy.
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