Meshy: Animate Model

This is the payoff node in Meshy's character pipeline. Once you've generated a character and run it through Meshy: Rig Model, this node takes the rigged result and applies an actual animation to it. You pick an action from Meshy's animation library by its numeric ID, and a few minutes later you've got an animated GLB and FBX - no keyframes, no Mixamo upload, no animation rigging knowledge required.

The catch list is short but important. This is a paid cloud API node (Comfy Org account + credits, ~$0.12 per action), and it only does what it says: it applies a canned action to a previously rigged character. No rig task ID, no animation. It's the last hop in a chain that starts at image-to-model, passes through rig, and only then animates.

How it works

The node takes the rig_task_id output from Meshy: Rig Model - that's the MESHY_RIGGED_TASK_ID - plus an action_id integer. It fires Meshy's animation API, polls until the job completes, and downloads the animated character as both GLB and FBX into your output folder. The heavy lifting is entirely server-side, which means the animation is smooth and retargeted properly without you doing anything. That's the appeal: a walking, waving, or dancing character from a still image, minutes of wall-clock time.

The inputs that matter

There are only two, which is refreshing.

• rig_task_id - required, and it must come from a Meshy rig node (either this pack's MeshyRigModelNode or a Meshy task that produced a rigged character). Feeding it a plain draft model task ID fails, because there's no skeleton to animate.
• action_id - an INT from 0–696. This is the entire interface, and it's famously opaque: the tooltip points to Meshy's animation library docs (docs.meshy.ai/en/api/animation-library) for the value list. There's no in-node search, so keep that page open. A smaller action ID doesn't mean "more basic" - it's just a catalog number.

Outputs: model_file (STRING path), GLB, and FBX. Note there's no task-ID output here - once you've animated, the chain ends.

Common issues

The most common failure is architectural: trying to animate a model that was never rigged, or feeding in the wrong task ID type. Rig it first. Second, the action catalog is a numbers game - you'll spend some credits discovering which action ID is a walk versus a dance, and there's no preview in the node. Test one cheap action before committing to a batch. And it bears repeating: every action is a paid cloud job, so animate a character you're happy with, not a draft you're still iterating on. If you'd rather not pay per animation, the usual local route (rig in Mixamo, animate in Blender) is free but is real work - this node's whole job is to skip that work.