Tripo: Retarget rigged model

Here's the payoff of the whole animation side of this pack. TripoAnimateRetargetNode takes a rigged model and applies a canned animation to it - pick "walk" and suddenly your character is walking. No keyframes, no timeline, no Blender. This is the node that turns "I have a 3D character" into "I have a 3D character with a usable idle/walk/jump cycle" in one run.

The name is doing real work: "retarget" means the animation was authored for one skeleton and is being re-mapped onto yours. Tripo's cloud handles the retargeting, which is the fiddly part that normally takes an artist an afternoon.

What it takes

One required input and one very important precondition. The model_info must point at a rigged model - the output of TripoAnimateRigNode. Feed it an unrigged mesh and there's nothing to retarget onto; the pack can't manufacture motion out of raw geometry. So the chain is always draft → (refine) → rig → this node.

The inputs that matter:

• animation - the preset menu, and it's a good one: idle, walk, run, dive, climb, jump, slash, shoot, hurt, fall, turn, plus movement cycles for other body plans (quadruped:walk, hexapod:walk, octopod:walk, serpentine:march, aquatic:march). The creature presets are the sleeper feature - you can rig a spider and get a proper six-legged gait instead of a humanoid walk mashed onto it.
• out_format - glb or fbx, matching what you exported from the rig node.
• bake_animation (on) bakes the motion into the mesh's keyframes so it plays everywhere without a runtime retargeter. Leave it on unless you know you need the raw, un-baked skeleton.
• export_with_geometry (off) - controls whether the output carries the mesh along or is just the animation data.

Outputs are the standard pair again: model_file (path to the animated GLB/FBX in ComfyUI/output/) and updated model_info, which you can push into TripoConvertNode if you need it in a different format for your engine.

Install

You know the drill by now - it's the same pack, so this is a one-time setup:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/VAST-AI-Research/ComfyUI-Tripo
cd ComfyUI-Tripo && pip install -r requirements.txt

Or "Tripo for ComfyUI" in ComfyUI Manager. API key from platform.tripo3d.ai, passed via env, config.json, or node field.

The honest part

The presets are genuinely useful, but keep expectations calibrated. They're generic motion - a neutral walk, a serviceable slash - not custom choreography. If you need a character to do something specific, this is a starting point you then edit in a DCC, not a finished take. And remember the whole pipeline is cloud work: each retarget burns credits and takes longer than the draft step, so batch your animation experiments instead of iterating one at a time like you would with local generation. Try several presets on a cheap model first, then commit to the winner for the real asset.