Showing 1–25 of 57 results for all: rigging skinning

BLARM: Animating 3D Objects from Video via Blending Latent Rigid Motion Primitives

Authors: Pradyumn Goyal, Yizhak Ben-Shabat, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Haomiao Jiang, Snehasish Mukherjee, Kyle Spence, Mark Stauber, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Yunze Zeng

Abstract: …animation. Given a monocular video and a static object mesh, BLARM predicts a temporally coherent animated mesh whose motion follows the video. Rather than relying on explicit rigs or directly regressing high-dimensional vertex motion, we represent animation using a compact set of learned, time-varying rigid motion components and time-invariant vertex-to-com… ▽ More We introduce BLARM, a feed-forward method for video-driven 3D mesh animation. Given a monocular video and a static object mesh, BLARM predicts a temporally coherent animated mesh whose motion follows the video. Rather than relying on explicit rigs or directly regressing high-dimensional vertex motion, we represent animation using a compact set of learned, time-varying rigid motion components and time-invariant vertex-to-component skinning weights. This yields a low-dimensional deformation space without requiring skeletons, cages, skinning weights, or rig annotations. Our architecture conditions geometry-derived deformation latents on video features through factorized spatial-temporal attention, then decodes rigid transformations blended by predicted skinning weights. Trained with trajectory reconstruction, entropy regularization, and motion-aware contrastive learning, BLARM produces accurate and temporally stable animations while recovering compact, interpretable motion structure from monocular video. △ Less

Submitted 31 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

G-Skin: Learning to Bind 3D Gaussians with Generative Visual Priors

Authors: Yuxin Yao, Kendong Liu, Shiqi Zhou, Jiazhi Xia, Junhui Hou

Abstract: …Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic and efficient rendering, leading to a rapid increase in 3D assets represented by 3D Gaussian primitives. Directly rigging these assets with arbitrary skeleton topologies is highly desirable. However, training a feed-forward… ▽ More 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic and efficient rendering, leading to a rapid increase in 3D assets represented by 3D Gaussian primitives. Directly rigging these assets with arbitrary skeleton topologies is highly desirable. However, training a feed-forward skinning framework is infeasible due to the lack of high-quality 3D Gaussian rigging datasets. An alternative solution is to transfer mesh-based techniques to 3D Gaussian-based representation, but 3D Gaussian primitives are not restricted to the surface and lack explicit topological connectivity. Moreover, this kind of method suffers from poor generalization to unseen data due to its strong dependence on training data, while acquiring high-quality rigging data is prohibitively expensive. To address this challenging problem, we propose G-Skin, a novel generative skinning framework designed for expressive and high-fidelity animation with 3D Gaussian representation. To overcome this 3D data scarcity, we introduce a skeleton-controllable image generation model leveraging 2D vision foundation models to distill powerful motion priors into pseudo-guidance. Guided by these priors, we formulate an optimization pipeline incorporating geometry-aware regularizations, which stabilizes the learning process and ensures smooth, structurally coherent skinning weights. G-Skin also generalizes flexibly to the augmented variants of 3D Gaussian representation designed to mitigate animation-induced rendering artifacts. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating clear advantages over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://yaoyx689.github.io/GSkin.html. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

ViP-Rig: Visual-Prompted Controllable Rigging

Authors: Zihan Qin, Mingze Sun, Yifan Mao, Jialei Xu, Jingfeng Guo, Changrong Hu, Wenbo Zhao, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu

Abstract: Rigging is inherently task-dependent because the same mesh may require different skeletons and deformation behaviors across animation tasks. In practice, artists often inspect an initial… ▽ More Rigging is inherently task-dependent because the same mesh may require different skeletons and deformation behaviors across animation tasks. In practice, artists often inspect an initial rig and repeatedly edit its skeletal structure and deformation behavior to meet specific animation requirements. Existing automatic methods primarily generate a plausible rig from geometry, offering limited explicit control over the resulting skeleton and deformation behavior. In this work, we present ViP-Rig, a visual-prompted framework that supports both prompt-first rigging and result-guided editing by injecting features extracted from user-drawn or edited 2D skeletal and rigidity prompts into frozen pretrained backbones. Specifically, ViP-Rig consists of two stages, Skeleton Generation and Skinning Prediction. In the first stage, the skeletal sketch is processed by the Dense-to-Compact Visual Prompt Encoding to produce compact, fixed-length conditioning tokens. The resulting tokens are injected into a frozen pretrained autoregressive generator through gated adapters to control joint placement and branching structure while preserving the generator's geometric prior. In the second stage, the rigidity map is processed using the same visual encoding design, while the pretrained skinning backbone remains frozen. The resulting tokens are symmetrically injected into the point and joint streams to modulate point-joint compatibility and the resulting skinning weights. Experiments on Articulation-XL2.0 and zero-shot evaluation on ModelsResource show that ViP-Rig more accurately recovers target skeletons and skinning weights than geometry-conditioned baselines under prompt-guided evaluation. Qualitative results further demonstrate explicit and localized control in both prompt-first rigging and result-guided editing. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures. Zihan Qin and Mingze Sun contributed equally. Xianming Liu is the corresponding author

RigPAPR: Rig-Based Animation of Static Neural Point Clouds from a Fixed-Viewpoint Video

Authors: Shichong Peng, Yanshu Zhang, Ke Li

Abstract: …we aim to animate it to follow a monocular fixed-viewpoint driving video of the subject, whether captured or produced by image-to-video (I2V) generation, and to recover a rigged, re-posable 3D asset. Existing methods deform Gaussian splats through direct linear blend… ▽ More Static neural point reconstructions capture a subject at high fidelity from posed images. Given such a reconstruction, we aim to animate it to follow a monocular fixed-viewpoint driving video of the subject, whether captured or produced by image-to-video (I2V) generation, and to recover a rigged, re-posable 3D asset. Existing methods deform Gaussian splats through direct linear blend skinning (LBS) or mesh proxies, both of which are prone to joint-boundary artifacts under articulation, even with per-primitive corrections. We trace the artifact to the representation: each splat carries an individual shape calibrated in the canonical pose to tile with its neighbours. Under rigid LBS, each splat moves with its bone but cannot bend, so the canonical tiling breaks at joint boundaries into gaps and spikes. Proximity attention point rendering (PAPR) instead carries no per-primitive shape; each pixel is recomposed at render time from the deformed primitives' positions, so the surface re-forms naturally with the articulation. We present RigPAPR, which auto-rigs a static PAPR cloud and drives it under direct LBS from a single fixed-viewpoint video, without mesh proxy, pose-dependent correction, or category template. On synthetic subjects, RigPAPR matches the strongest baseline at the supervised view and exceeds mesh-based and Gaussian-splatting baselines at novel views by 3+dB PSNR, with cleaner joint-boundary renderings of both synthetic and real subjects. △ Less

Submitted 4 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: An overview video is available at https://youtu.be/up3BwRHYWG8

Fishbone: From One 3D Asset to a Million Controllable Edits

Authors: Yumeng He, Xiaoying Wang, Peihao Li, Yanjia Huang, Joe Masterjohn, Jiajun Wu, Leonidas Guibas, Yin Yang, Ying Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang

Abstract: …for computer graphics, embodied AI, robotics, and interactive content creation, yet creating diverse 3D assets remains challenging due to the high cost of manual modeling and rigging. Shape deformation offers a natural way to generate variations from existing meshes, but existing data-driven methods often rely on sparse user inputs, while parametric editing… ▽ More Large-scale controllable 3D assets are critical for computer graphics, embodied AI, robotics, and interactive content creation, yet creating diverse 3D assets remains challenging due to the high cost of manual modeling and rigging. Shape deformation offers a natural way to generate variations from existing meshes, but existing data-driven methods often rely on sparse user inputs, while parametric editing frameworks require manually designed control structures and category-specific configurations. Inspired by natural creatures, where a central spine governs global shape and cross-sectional ribs control local variation, we introduce Fishbone, a unified rib-spine representation for general shapes that supports controllable parametric mesh deformation, reduced-space dynamics, and animation. Given an input mesh, Fishbone computes a geodesic scalar field with an adaptive heat method, extracts iso-contours as cross-sectional ribs, constructs a smooth geometry-aware spine through rib centers, and associates surface vertices with nearby rib and spine structures using Gaussian-weighted skinning. The resulting representation enables real-time and predictable deformation: ribs control local profiles such as thickness, orientation, and cross-sectional variation, while the spine controls global bending, twisting, and stretching. The same structure also supports reduced-space simulation and keyframe animation. We further construct Fishbone-136K by augmenting Hunyuan3D with rib-spine structures, and demonstrate applications in controllable 3D generation, deformation-based data augmentation for robot learning, interactive mesh editing, and agentic generation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and versatility of the proposed framework. △ Less

Submitted 23 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: 20 pages, 19 figures

TOPOS: High-Fidelity and Efficient Industry-Grade 3D Head Generation

Authors: Bojun Xiong, Zoubin Bi, Xinghui Peng, Yunmu Wang, Junchen Deng, Jun Liang, Jing Li, Bowen Cai, Huan Fu

Abstract: …industrial pipelines, studios typically enforce a fixed reference topology across all head assets, as such a clean and uniform topology is a prerequisite for production-level rigging, skinning and animation. In this paper, we present TOPOS, a framework tailored for single image conditioned 3D head generation that joint… ▽ More High-fidelity 3D head generation plays a crucial role in the film, animation and video game industries. In industrial pipelines, studios typically enforce a fixed reference topology across all head assets, as such a clean and uniform topology is a prerequisite for production-level rigging, skinning and animation. In this paper, we present TOPOS, a framework tailored for single image conditioned 3D head generation that jointly recovers geometry and appearance under such an industry-standard topology. In contrast to general 3D generative models which produce triangle meshes with inconsistent topology and numerous vertices, hindering semantic correspondence and asset-level reuse, TOPOS generates head meshes with a fixed, studio-style topology, enabling consistent vertex-level correspondence across all generated heads. To model heads under this unified topology, we proposed a novel variational autoencoder structure, termed TOPOS-VAE. Inspired by multi-model large language models (MLLMs), our TOPOS-VAE leverages the Perceiver Resampler to convert input pointclouds sampled from head meshes of diverse topologies into the target reference topology. Building upon TOPOS-VAE's structured latent space, we train a rectified flow transformer, TOPOS-DiT, to efficiently generate high-fidelity head meshes from a single image. We further present TOPOS-Texture, an end-to-end module that produces relightable UV texture maps from the same portrait image via fine-tuning a multimodal image generative model. The generated textures are spatially aligned with the underlying mesh geometry and faithfully preserve high-frequency appearance details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TOPOS achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D head generation, surpassing both classical face reconstruction methods and general 3D object generative models, highlighting its effectiveness for digital human creation. △ Less

Submitted 14 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Technical Report

Rigel3D: Rig-aware Latents for Animation-Ready 3D Asset Generation

Authors: Nikitas Chatzis, Marios Loizou, Evangelos Kalogerakis

Abstract: Recent 3D generative models can synthesize high-quality assets, but their outputs are typically static: they lack the skeletal rigs, joint hierarchies, and… ▽ More Recent 3D generative models can synthesize high-quality assets, but their outputs are typically static: they lack the skeletal rigs, joint hierarchies, and skinning weights required for animation. This limits their use in games, film, simulation, virtual agents, and embodied AI, where assets must not only look plausible but also move plausibly. We introduce Rigel3D, a generative method for animation-ready 3D assets represented as rigged meshes. Unlike post-hoc auto-rigging methods that attach rigs to completed shapes, our method jointly models geometry and rig structure through coupled surface and skeleton structured latent representations. A rig-aware autoencoder decodes these representations into mesh geometry, skeleton topology, joint coordinates, and skinning weights, while a two-stage latent generative model synthesizes both surface and skeleton representations for image-conditioned generation. To support downstream animation workflows, we further introduce an open-vocabulary joint labeling module that embeds generated joints into a shared vision-language space, enabling correspondence to arbitrary retargeting templates. Experiments on large-scale rigged asset datasets demonstrate that our method generates diverse, high-quality animation-ready assets and outperforms existing rigging baselines across multiple metrics. △ Less

Submitted 13 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

ViPS: Video-informed Pose Spaces for Auto-Rigged Meshes

Authors: Honglin Chen, Karran Pandey, Rundi Wu, Matheus Gadelha, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Ayush Tewari, Niloy J. Mitra, Changxi Zheng, Paul Guerrero

Abstract: Kinematic rigs provide a structured interface for articulating 3D meshes but lack any associated pose space, i.e., an explicit representation of the plausible manifold of joint configurations for a given mesh. Without such a pose space, stochastic sampling or manual manipulation of raw… ▽ More Kinematic rigs provide a structured interface for articulating 3D meshes but lack any associated pose space, i.e., an explicit representation of the plausible manifold of joint configurations for a given mesh. Without such a pose space, stochastic sampling or manual manipulation of raw rig parameters easily results in semantic and/or geometric violations, such as anatomical hyperextension and non-physical self-intersections. We propose Video-informed Pose Spaces (ViPS), a feedforward framework that discovers the latent distribution of valid articulations for auto-rigged meshes by distilling motion priors from a pretrained video diffusion model. Unlike existing methods that rely on scarce, artist-authored 4D datasets, or focus on reconstructing instances of individual motions, ViPS transfers generative video model priors into a universal distribution over the given rig parameterization. Differentiable geometric validators applied to the skinned mesh enforce shape-specific integrity without requiring manual regularizers. Our feedforward model reveals a smooth, compact, and controllable pose space. This, in turn, supports sampling for diverse shape variations, manifold projection for inverse kinematics, and temporally coherent trajectories for animation and keyframing. Further, the distilled 3D pose samples serve as semantic proxies to guide video diffusion, effectively closing the loop between generative 2D priors and structured 3D kinematic control. Our evaluations show that ViPS, trained solely using video priors, matches the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on synthetic artist-created 4D data in both plausibility and diversity. Additionally, as a universal model, ViPS exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution species and unseen skeletal topologies. △ Less

Submitted 20 May, 2026; v1 submitted 19 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Project page: https://honglin-c.github.io/vips/

Amortized Inverse Kinematics via Graph Attention for Real-Time Human Avatar Animation

Authors: Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Chen-Yu Wang, Tim Prokosch, Michael Lorenz, Bertram Taetz, Didier Stricker

Abstract: …real-time human avatar pipelines, the available signal per frame is a sparse set of tracked 3D joint positions, whereas animation systems require joint orientations to drive skinning. Recovering full orientations from positions is underconstrained, most notably because twist about bone axes is ambiguous, and classical IK solvers typically rely on iterative o… ▽ More Inverse kinematics (IK) is a core operation in animation, robotics, and biomechanics: given Cartesian constraints, recover joint rotations under a known kinematic tree. In many real-time human avatar pipelines, the available signal per frame is a sparse set of tracked 3D joint positions, whereas animation systems require joint orientations to drive skinning. Recovering full orientations from positions is underconstrained, most notably because twist about bone axes is ambiguous, and classical IK solvers typically rely on iterative optimization that can be slow and sensitive to noisy inputs. We introduce IK-GAT, a lightweight graph-attention network that reconstructs full-body joint orientations from 3D joint positions in a single forward pass. The model performs message passing over the skeletal parent-child graph to exploit kinematic structure during rotation inference. To simplify learning, IK-GAT predicts rotations in a bone-aligned world-frame representation anchored to rest-pose bone frames. This parameterization makes the twist axis explicit and is exactly invertible to standard parent-relative local rotations given the kinematic tree and rest pose. The network uses a continuous 6D rotation representation and is trained with a geodesic loss on SO(3) together with an optional forward-kinematics consistency regularizer. IK-GAT produces animation-ready local rotations that can directly drive a rigged avatar or be converted to pose parameters of SMPL-like body models for real-time and online applications. With 374K parameters and over 650 FPS on CPU, IK-GAT outperforms VPoser-based per-frame iterative optimization without warm-start at significantly lower cost, and is robust to initial pose and input noise △ Less

Submitted 17 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

F3G-Avatar : Face Focused Full-body Gaussian Avatar

Authors: Willem Menu, Erkut Akdag, Pedro Quesado, Yasaman Kashefbahrami, Egor Bondarev

Abstract: …avatar synthesis method that reconstructs animatable human representations from multi-view RGB video and regressed pose/shape parameters. Starting from a clothed Momentum Human Rig (MHR) template, front/back positional maps are rendered and decoded into 3D Gaussians through a two-branch architecture: a body branch that captures pose-dependent non-rigid defor… ▽ More Existing full-body Gaussian avatar methods primarily optimize global reconstruction quality and often fail to preserve fine-grained facial geometry and expression details. This challenge arises from limited facial representational capacity that causes difficulties in modeling high-frequency pose-dependent deformations. To address this, we propose F3G-Avatar, a full-body, face-aware avatar synthesis method that reconstructs animatable human representations from multi-view RGB video and regressed pose/shape parameters. Starting from a clothed Momentum Human Rig (MHR) template, front/back positional maps are rendered and decoded into 3D Gaussians through a two-branch architecture: a body branch that captures pose-dependent non-rigid deformations and a face-focused deformation branch that refines head geometry and appearance. The predicted Gaussians are fused, posed with linear blend skinning (LBS), and rendered with differentiable Gaussian splatting. Training combines reconstruction and perceptual objectives with a face-specific adversarial loss to enhance realism in close-up views. Experiments demonstrate strong rendering quality, with face-view performance reaching PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS of 26.243/0.964/0.084 on the AvatarReX dataset. Ablations further highlight contributions of the MHR template and the face-focused deformation. F3G-Avatar provides a practical, high-quality pipeline for realistic, animatable full-body avatar synthesis. △ Less

Submitted 10 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: CVPRW 3DMV, 10 pages

AniGen: Unified $S^3$ Fields for Animatable 3D Asset Generation

Authors: Yi-Hua Huang, Zi-Xin Zou, Yuting He, Chirui Chang, Cheng-Feng Pu, Ziyi Yang, Yuan-Chen Guo, Yan-Pei Cao, Xiaojuan Qi

Abstract: Animatable 3D assets, defined as geometry equipped with an articulated skeleton and skinning weights, are fundamental to interactive graphics, embodied agents, and animation production. While recent 3D generative models can synthesize visually plausible shapes from images, the results are typically static. Obtaining usable… ▽ More Animatable 3D assets, defined as geometry equipped with an articulated skeleton and skinning weights, are fundamental to interactive graphics, embodied agents, and animation production. While recent 3D generative models can synthesize visually plausible shapes from images, the results are typically static. Obtaining usable rigs via post-hoc auto-rigging is brittle and often produces skeletons that are topologically inconsistent with the generated geometry. We present AniGen, a unified framework that directly generates animate-ready 3D assets conditioned on a single image. Our key insight is to represent shape, skeleton, and skinning as mutually consistent $S^3$ Fields (Shape, Skeleton, Skin) defined over a shared spatial domain. To enable the robust learning of these fields, we introduce two technical innovations: (i) a confidence-decaying skeleton field that explicitly handles the geometric ambiguity of bone prediction at Voronoi boundaries, and (ii) a dual skin feature field that decouples skinning weights from specific joint counts, allowing a fixed-architecture network to predict rigs of arbitrary complexity. Built upon a two-stage flow-matching pipeline, AniGen first synthesizes a sparse structural scaffold and then generates dense geometry and articulation in a structured latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AniGen substantially outperforms state-of-the-art sequential baselines in rig validity and animation quality, generalizing effectively to in-the-wild images across diverse categories including animals, humanoids, and machinery. Homepage: https://yihua7.github.io/AniGen-web/ △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; v1 submitted 9 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 12 figures

GaussiAnimate: Reconstruct and Rig Animatable Categories with Level of Dynamics

Authors: Jiaxin Wang, Dongxin Lyu, Zeyu Cai, Zhiyang Dou, Cheng Lin, Anpei Chen, Yuliang Xiu

Abstract: …that conform closely to the surface, can effectively capture non-rigid deformations, but lack a kinematic structure necessary for intuitive control. Thus, we propose a Scaffold-Skin… ▽ More Free-form bones, that conform closely to the surface, can effectively capture non-rigid deformations, but lack a kinematic structure necessary for intuitive control. Thus, we propose a Scaffold-Skin Rigging System, termed "Skelebones", with three key steps: (1) Bones: compress temporally-consistent deformable Gaussians into free-form bones, approximating non-rigid surface deformations; (2) Skeleton: extract a Mean Curvature Skeleton from canonical Gaussians and refine it temporally, ensuring a category-agnostic, motion-adaptive, and topology-correct kinematic structure; (3) Binding: bind the skeleton and bones via non-parametric partwise motion matching (PartMM), synthesizing novel bone motions by matching, retrieving, and blending existing ones. Collectively, these three steps enable us to compress the Level of Dynamics of 4D shapes into compact skelebones that are both controllable and expressive. We validate our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving significant improvements in reanimation performance across unseen poses-with 17.3% PSNR gains over Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) and 21.7% over Bag-of-Bones (BoB)-while maintaining excellent reconstruction fidelity, particularly for characters exhibiting complex non-rigid surface dynamics. Our Partwise Motion Matching algorithm demonstrates strong generalization to both Gaussian and mesh representations, especially under low-data regime (~1000 frames), achieving 48.4% RMSE improvement over robust LBS and outperforming GRU- and MLP-based learning methods by >20%. Code will be made publicly available for research purposes at cookmaker.cn/gaussianimate. △ Less

Submitted 9 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Page: https://cookmaker.cn/gaussianimate

PoseCraft: Tokenized 3D Body Landmark and Camera Conditioning for Photorealistic Human Image Synthesis

Authors: Zhilin Guo, Jing Yang, Kyle Fogarty, Jingyi Wan, Boqiao Zhang, Tianhao Wu, Weihao Xia, Chenliang Zhou, Sakar Khattar, Fangcheng Zhong, Cristina Nader Vasconcelos, Cengiz Oztireli

Abstract: Digitizing humans and synthesizing photorealistic avatars with explicit 3D pose and camera controls are central to VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing skinning-based workflows require laborious manual rigging or template-based fittings, while neural volumetric methods rely on canonical templates and re-optimi… ▽ More Digitizing humans and synthesizing photorealistic avatars with explicit 3D pose and camera controls are central to VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing skinning-based workflows require laborious manual rigging or template-based fittings, while neural volumetric methods rely on canonical templates and re-optimization for each unseen pose. We present PoseCraft, a diffusion framework built around tokenized 3D interface: instead of relying only on rasterized geometry as 2D control images, we encode sparse 3D landmarks and camera extrinsics as discrete conditioning tokens and inject them into diffusion via cross-attention. Our approach preserves 3D semantics by avoiding 2D re-projection ambiguity under large pose and viewpoint changes, and produces photorealistic imagery that faithfully captures identity and appearance. To train and evaluate at scale, we also implement GenHumanRF, a data generation workflow that renders diverse supervision from volumetric reconstructions. Our experiments show that PoseCraft achieves significant perceptual quality improvement over diffusion-centric methods, and attains better or comparable metrics to latest volumetric rendering SOTA while better preserving fabric and hair details. △ Less

Submitted 22 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

SPRig: Self-Supervised Pose-Invariant Rigging from Mesh Sequences

Authors: Ruipeng Wang, Langkun Zhong, Miaowei Wang

Abstract: State-of-the-art rigging methods typically assume a predefined canonical rest pose. However, this assumption does not hold for dynamic mesh sequences such as DyMesh or DT4D, where no canonical T-pose is available. When applied independently frame-by-frame, existing methods lack pose invariance and often yield temporally inconsistent topologies. To address th… ▽ More State-of-the-art rigging methods typically assume a predefined canonical rest pose. However, this assumption does not hold for dynamic mesh sequences such as DyMesh or DT4D, where no canonical T-pose is available. When applied independently frame-by-frame, existing methods lack pose invariance and often yield temporally inconsistent topologies. To address this limitation, we propose SPRig, a general fine-tuning framework that enforces cross-frame consistency across a sequence to learn pose-invariant rigs on top of existing models, covering both skeleton and skinning generation. For skeleton generation, we introduce novel consistency regularization in both token space and geometry space. For skinning, we improve temporal stability through an articulation-invariant consistency loss combined with consistency distillation and structural regularization. Extensive experiments show that SPRig achieves superior temporal coherence and significantly reduces artifacts in prior methods, without sacrificing and often even enhancing per-frame static generation quality. The code is available in the supplemental material and will be made publicly available upon publication. △ Less

Submitted 13 March, 2026; v1 submitted 13 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: Code: https://github.com/WANG-Ruipeng/SPRig

Skin Tokens: A Learned Compact Representation for Unified Autoregressive Rigging

Authors: Jia-peng Zhang, Cheng-Feng Pu, Meng-Hao Guo, Yan-Pei Cao, Shi-Min Hu

Abstract: The rapid proliferation of generative 3D models has created a critical bottleneck in animation pipelines: rigging. Existing automated methods are fundamentally limited by their approach to… ▽ More The rapid proliferation of generative 3D models has created a critical bottleneck in animation pipelines: rigging. Existing automated methods are fundamentally limited by their approach to skinning, treating it as an ill-posed, high-dimensional regression task that is inefficient to optimize and is typically decoupled from skeleton generation. We posit this is a representation problem and introduce SkinTokens: a learned, compact, and discrete representation for skinning weights. By leveraging an FSQ-CVAE to capture the intrinsic sparsity of skinning, we reframe the task from continuous regression to a more tractable token sequence prediction problem. This representation enables TokenRig, a unified autoregressive framework that models the entire rig as a single sequence of skeletal parameters and SkinTokens, learning the complicated dependencies between skeletons and skin deformations. The unified model is then amenable to a reinforcement learning stage, where tailored geometric and semantic rewards improve generalization to complex, out-of-distribution assets. Quantitatively, the SkinTokens representation leads to a 98%-133% percents improvement in skinning accuracy over state-of-the-art methods, while the full TokenRig framework, refined with RL, enhances bone prediction by 17%-22%. Our work presents a unified, generative approach to rigging that yields higher fidelity and robustness, offering a scalable solution to a long-standing challenge in 3D content creation. △ Less

Submitted 4 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: 14 pages, 10 figures

RigMo: Unifying Rig and Motion Learning for Generative Animation

Authors: Hao Zhang, Jiahao Luo, Bohui Wan, Yizhou Zhao, Zongrui Li, Michael Vasilkovsky, Chaoyang Wang, Jian Wang, Narendra Ahuja, Bing Zhou

Abstract: Despite significant progress in 4D generation, rig and motion, the core structural and dynamic components of animation are typically modeled as separate problems. Existing pipelines rely on ground-truth skeletons and… ▽ More Despite significant progress in 4D generation, rig and motion, the core structural and dynamic components of animation are typically modeled as separate problems. Existing pipelines rely on ground-truth skeletons and skinning weights for motion generation and treat auto-rigging as an independent process, undermining scalability and interpretability. We present RigMo, a unified generative framework that jointly learns rig and motion directly from raw mesh sequences, without any human-provided rig annotations. RigMo encodes per-vertex deformations into two compact latent spaces: a rig latent that decodes into explicit Gaussian bones and skinning weights, and a motion latent that produces time-varying SE(3) transformations. Together, these outputs define an animatable mesh with explicit structure and coherent motion, enabling feed-forward rig and motion inference for deformable objects. Beyond unified rig-motion discovery, we introduce a Motion-DiT model operating in RigMo's latent space and demonstrate that these structure-aware latents can naturally support downstream motion generation tasks. Experiments on DeformingThings4D, Objaverse-XL, and TrueBones demonstrate that RigMo learns smooth, interpretable, and physically plausible rigs, while achieving superior reconstruction and category-level generalization compared to existing auto-rigging and deformation baselines. RigMo establishes a new paradigm for unified, structure-aware, and scalable dynamic 3D modeling. △ Less

Submitted 9 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://RigMo-Page.github.io

Make-It-Poseable: Feed-forward Latent Posing Model for 3D Characters

Authors: Zhiyang Guo, Ori Zhang, Jax Xiang, Alan Zhao, Zhenxun Yuan, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li

Abstract: Posing 3D characters is a fundamental task in computer graphics. However, existing paradigms, ranging from traditional auto-rigging to recent pose-conditioned generative models, frequently struggle with inaccurate… ▽ More Posing 3D characters is a fundamental task in computer graphics. However, existing paradigms, ranging from traditional auto-rigging to recent pose-conditioned generative models, frequently struggle with inaccurate skinning weights, fixed mesh topologies, and poor pose conformance. These challenges have become particularly pronounced with the recent explosion of AI-generated 3D assets, which often exhibit flawed structures and fused geometry. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{Make-It-Poseable}, a novel feed-forward framework that reformulates character posing as a skinning-free latent-space transformation problem. By decoupling shape deformation from the constraints of fixed mesh connectivity, our method directly operates on compact latent representations to reconstruct characters in target poses. To achieve this, our framework integrates a latent posing transformer for shape manipulation, a dense pose representation for fine-grained control, and an adaptive completion module optimized via a bipartite-matched latent loss to robustly handle topological changes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in posing quality. Furthermore, our design shows promising generalization to diverse morphologies such as quadrupeds in our qualitative tests, and supports various 3D authoring applications such as part replacement and refinement. △ Less

Submitted 2 September, 2026; v1 submitted 18 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2026. Project page: https://jasongzy.github.io/Make-It-Poseable/

AnimaMimic: Imitating 3D Animation from Video Priors

Authors: Tianyi Xie, Yunuo Chen, Yaowei Guo, Yin Yang, Bolei Zhou, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ying Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang

Abstract: Creating realistic 3D animation remains a time-consuming and expertise-dependent process, requiring manual rigging, keyframing, and fine-tuning of complex motions. Meanwhile, video diffusion models have recently demonstrated remarkable motion imagination in 2D, generating dynamic and visually coherent motion from text or image prompts. However, their results… ▽ More Creating realistic 3D animation remains a time-consuming and expertise-dependent process, requiring manual rigging, keyframing, and fine-tuning of complex motions. Meanwhile, video diffusion models have recently demonstrated remarkable motion imagination in 2D, generating dynamic and visually coherent motion from text or image prompts. However, their results lack explicit 3D structure and cannot be directly used for animation or simulation. We present AnimaMimic, a framework that animates static 3D meshes using motion priors learned from video diffusion models. Starting from an input mesh, AnimaMimic synthesizes a monocular animation video, automatically constructs a skeleton with skinning weights, and refines joint parameters through differentiable rendering and video-based supervision. To further enhance realism, we integrate a differentiable simulation module that refines mesh deformation through physically grounded soft-tissue dynamics. Our method bridges the creativity of video diffusion and the structural control of 3D rigged animation, producing physically plausible, temporally coherent, and artist-editable motion sequences that integrate seamlessly into standard animation pipelines. Our project page is at: https://xpandora.github.io/AnimaMimic/ △ Less

Submitted 16 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

FastAnimate: Towards Learnable Template Construction and Pose Deformation for Fast 3D Human Avatar Animation

Authors: Jian Shu, Nanjie Yao, Gangjian Zhang, Junlong Ren, Yu Feng, Hao Wang

Abstract: …divide this task into two stages: canonical template construction and target pose deformation. However, current template construction methods demand extensive skeletal rigging and often produce artifacts for specific poses. Moreover, target pose deformation suffers from structural distortions caused by Linear Blend… ▽ More 3D human avatar animation aims at transforming a human avatar from an arbitrary initial pose to a specified target pose using deformation algorithms. Existing approaches typically divide this task into two stages: canonical template construction and target pose deformation. However, current template construction methods demand extensive skeletal rigging and often produce artifacts for specific poses. Moreover, target pose deformation suffers from structural distortions caused by Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), which significantly undermines animation realism. To address these problems, we propose a unified learning-based framework to address both challenges in two phases. For the former phase, to overcome the inefficiencies and artifacts during template construction, we leverage a U-Net architecture that decouples texture and pose information in a feed-forward process, enabling fast generation of a human template. For the latter phase, we propose a data-driven refinement technique that enhances structural integrity. Extensive experiments show that our model delivers consistent performance across diverse poses with an optimal balance between efficiency and quality,surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. △ Less

Submitted 1 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: 9 pages,4 figures

Stable Part Diffusion 4D: Multi-View RGB and Kinematic Parts Video Generation

Authors: Hao Zhang, Chun-Han Yao, Simon Donné, Narendra Ahuja, Varun Jampani

Abstract: …to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged obje… ▽ More We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts - structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify the architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latent VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL (Deitke et al., 2023), each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks. △ Less

Submitted 4 November, 2025; v1 submitted 12 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Comments: Page: https://stablepartdiffusion4d.github.io/

Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models

Authors: Chaoyue Song, Xiu Li, Fan Yang, Zhongcong Xu, Jiacheng Wei, Fayao Liu, Jiashi Feng, Guosheng Lin, Jianfeng Zhang

Abstract: …into animated assets constitutes a significant bottleneck in content creation pipelines. While recent advances in generative AI have revolutionized static 3D model creation, rigging and animation continue to depend heavily on expert intervention. We present Puppeteer, a comprehensive framework that addresses both automatic… ▽ More Modern interactive applications increasingly demand dynamic 3D content, yet the transformation of static 3D models into animated assets constitutes a significant bottleneck in content creation pipelines. While recent advances in generative AI have revolutionized static 3D model creation, rigging and animation continue to depend heavily on expert intervention. We present Puppeteer, a comprehensive framework that addresses both automatic rigging and animation for diverse 3D objects. Our system first predicts plausible skeletal structures via an auto-regressive transformer that introduces a joint-based tokenization strategy for compact representation and a hierarchical ordering methodology with stochastic perturbation that enhances bidirectional learning capabilities. It then infers skinning weights via an attention-based architecture incorporating topology-aware joint attention that explicitly encodes inter-joint relationships based on skeletal graph distances. Finally, we complement these rigging advances with a differentiable optimization-based animation pipeline that generates stable, high-fidelity animations while being computationally more efficient than existing approaches. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both skeletal prediction accuracy and skinning quality. The system robustly processes diverse 3D content, ranging from professionally designed game assets to AI-generated shapes, producing temporally coherent animations that eliminate the jittering issues common in existing methods. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

Comments: Project page: https://chaoyuesong.github.io/Puppeteer/

PoseMaster: A Unified 3D Native Framework for Stylized Pose Generation

Authors: Hongyu Yan, Kunming Luo, Weiyu Li, Kaiyi Zhang, Yixun Liang, Jingwei Huang, Chunchao Guo, Ping Tan

Abstract: …spatial alignment between the generated 3D meshes and the conditioning skeletons, PoseMaster enables the direct creation of animatable assets when coupled with automated skinning models, highlighting its compelling potential for automated character rigging. ▽ More Pose stylization, which aims to synthesize stylized content aligning with target poses, serves as a fundamental task across 2D, 3D, and video domains. In the 3D realm, prevailing approaches typically rely on a cascade pipeline: first manipulating the image pose via 2D foundation models and subsequently lifting it into 3D representations. However, this paradigm limits the precision and diversity of the 3d pose stylization. To this end, we propose a novel paradigm for 3D pose stylization that unifies pose stylization and 3D generation within a cohesive framework. This integration minimizes the risk of cumulative errors and enhances the model's efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, diverging from previous works that typically utilize 2D skeleton images as guidance, we directly utilize the 3D skeleton because it can provide a more accurate representation of 3D spatial and topological relationships, which significantly enhances the model's capacity to achieve richer and more precise pose stylization. Moreover, we develop a scalable data engine to construct a large-scale dataset of ''Image-Skeleton-Mesh'' triplets, enabling the model to jointly learn identity preservation and geometric alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PoseMaster significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Owing to the strict spatial alignment between the generated 3D meshes and the conditioning skeletons, PoseMaster enables the direct creation of animatable assets when coupled with automated skinning models, highlighting its compelling potential for automated character rigging. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; v1 submitted 26 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: Accepted by CVPR 2026, Code: https://github.com/hanryyan/PoseMaster

PhysRig: Differentiable Physics-Based Skinning and Rigging Framework for Realistic Articulated Object Modeling

Authors: Hao Zhang, Haolan Xu, Chun Feng, Varun Jampani, Narendra Ahuja

Abstract: Skinning and… ▽ More Skinning and rigging are fundamental components in animation, articulated object reconstruction, motion transfer, and 4D generation. Existing approaches predominantly rely on Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), due to its simplicity and differentiability. However, LBS introduces artifacts such as volume loss and unnatural deformations, and it fails to model elastic materials like soft tissues, fur, and flexible appendages (e.g., elephant trunks, ears, and fatty tissues). In this work, we propose PhysRig: a differentiable physics-based skinning and rigging framework that overcomes these limitations by embedding the rigid skeleton into a volumetric representation (e.g., a tetrahedral mesh), which is simulated as a deformable soft-body structure driven by the animated skeleton. Our method leverages continuum mechanics and discretizes the object as particles embedded in an Eulerian background grid to ensure differentiability with respect to both material properties and skeletal motion. Additionally, we introduce material prototypes, significantly reducing the learning space while maintaining high expressiveness. To evaluate our framework, we construct a comprehensive synthetic dataset using meshes from Objaverse, The Amazing Animals Zoo, and MixaMo, covering diverse object categories and motion patterns. Our method consistently outperforms traditional LBS-based approaches, generating more realistic and physically plausible results. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of our framework in the pose transfer task highlighting its versatility for articulated object modeling. △ Less

Submitted 27 June, 2025; v1 submitted 25 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: Accepted by ICCV 2025 Page: https://physrig.github.io/

Auto-Connect: Connectivity-Preserving RigFormer with Direct Preference Optimization

Authors: Jingfeng Guo, Jian Liu, Jinnan Chen, Shiwei Mao, Changrong Hu, Puhua Jiang, Junlin Yu, Jing Xu, Qi Liu, Lixin Xu, Zhuo Chen, Chunchao Guo

Abstract: We introduce Auto-Connect, a novel approach for automatic rigging that explicitly preserves skeletal connectivity through a connectivity-preserving tokenization scheme. Unlike previous methods that predict bone positions represented as two joints or first predict points before determining connectivity, our method employs special tokens to define endpoints fo… ▽ More We introduce Auto-Connect, a novel approach for automatic rigging that explicitly preserves skeletal connectivity through a connectivity-preserving tokenization scheme. Unlike previous methods that predict bone positions represented as two joints or first predict points before determining connectivity, our method employs special tokens to define endpoints for each joint's children and for each hierarchical layer, effectively automating connectivity relationships. This approach significantly enhances topological accuracy by integrating connectivity information directly into the prediction framework. To further guarantee high-quality topology, we implement a topology-aware reward function that quantifies topological correctness, which is then utilized in a post-training phase through reward-guided Direct Preference Optimization. Additionally, we incorporate implicit geodesic features for latent top-k bone selection, which substantially improves skinning quality. By leveraging geodesic distance information within the model's latent space, our approach intelligently determines the most influential bones for each vertex, effectively mitigating common skinning artifacts. This combination of connectivity-preserving tokenization, reward-guided fine-tuning, and geodesic-aware bone selection enables our model to consistently generate more anatomically plausible skeletal structures with superior deformation properties. △ Less

Submitted 20 October, 2025; v1 submitted 12 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Anymate: A Dataset and Baselines for Learning 3D Object Rigging

Authors: Yufan Deng, Yuhao Zhang, Chen Geng, Shangzhe Wu, Jiajun Wu

Abstract: Rigging and… ▽ More Rigging and skinning are essential steps to create realistic 3D animations, often requiring significant expertise and manual effort. Traditional attempts at automating these processes rely heavily on geometric heuristics and often struggle with objects of complex geometry. Recent data-driven approaches show potential for better generality, but are often constrained by limited training data. We present the Anymate Dataset, a large-scale dataset of 230K 3D assets paired with expert-crafted rigging and skinning information -- 70 times larger than existing datasets. Using this dataset, we propose a learning-based auto-rigging framework with three sequential modules for joint, connectivity, and skinning weight prediction. We systematically design and experiment with various architectures as baselines for each module and conduct comprehensive evaluations on our dataset to compare their performance. Our models significantly outperform existing methods, providing a foundation for comparing future methods in automated rigging and skinning. Code and dataset can be found at https://anymate3d.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 3 July, 2025; v1 submitted 9 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: SIGGRAPH 2025. Project page: https://anymate3d.github.io/