Skinning / Weight Painting¶
Characters & Avatars
Open Source¶
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A Geodesic Cut-Cell Prior for Neural Skinning Discovered by AI
2026
A geometric prior that approximates volumetric geodesic distances using a fast graph-based cut-cell approach, significantly improving the robustness and quality of data-driven neural skinning models.
geodesicgeometric-priorskinning -
PhySkin: Physics-based Bone-driven Neural Garment Simulation Discovered by AI
2026
A neural framework for learning bone-based physics-aware cloth deformation that optimizes skinning weights with physics-based losses and collision handling for realistic garment simulation.
cloth-deformationgarment-simulationphysics-basedskinning -
PhysSkin Discovered by AI
2026
A physics-informed framework that learns continuous skinning fields as basis functions to lift motion subspace coordinates to full-space deformation, achieving real-time and physically consistent animation.
deformationneural-skinningphysics-basedskinning -
Skin Tokens: A Learned Compact Representation for Unified Autoregressive Rigging Discovered by AI
2026
Introduces a learned, compact, and discrete representation for skinning weights called SkinTokens, transforming skinning from a high-dimensional regression task into a tokenized sequence modeling problem.
3d-characterautoregressiveriggingskinning -
Anymate: A Dataset and Baselines for Learning 3D Object Rigging Discovered by AI
2025
A large-scale dataset of 230K 3D assets paired with expert-crafted rigging and skinning information, along with a scalable learning-based auto-rigging framework for joint, connectivity, and skinning weight prediction.
auto-riggingdatasetriggingskinning -
FRESA: Feedforward Reconstruction of Personalized Skinned Avatars from Few Images Discovered by AI
2025
A feedforward method to reconstruct personalized skinned 3D human avatars with realistic pose-dependent animation from only a few images without requiring per-subject optimization.
3d-reconstructionavatar-generationfeedforwardskinned-avatar -
Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models Discovered by AI
2025
A comprehensive framework that automatically generates skeletal structures and skinning weights for diverse 3D objects, enabling video-guided animation through a differentiable optimization pipeline.
3d-animationriggingskeletonskinning -
SkinCells Discovered by AI
2025
A robust, fully automated method for generating high-quality skinning weights from a standard mesh and skeleton in a canonical pose using Voronoi cells.
automationskinningvoronoiweights -
Automatic Skinning using the Mixed Finite Element Method Discovered by AI
2024
A physics-based character skinning algorithm that utilizes a mixed finite element method (MFEM) discretization to avoid over-constraining issues in standard FEM approaches by introducing extra rotation and strain variables.
deformationfemphysicsskinning -
Compressed Skinning for Facial Blendshapes Discovered by AI
2024
A method to bake classical facial animation blendshapes into a fast linear blend skinning representation using proximal algorithms, allowing efficient and high-quality facial deformation.
blendshapesfacial-animationoptimizationskinning -
Robust Biharmonic Skinning Using Geometric Fields Discovered by AI
2024
An automatic skinning method that generates weight functions by solving a variational problem using geometric fields, bypassing the need for tetrahedralizing the mesh.
biharmonicgeometry-processingskinningweights -
VINECS Discovered by AI
2024
A video-based neural character skinning method that learns 3D characters with pose-dependent skinning from 2D multi-view video observations, enabling continuous multi-resolution skinning.
avatarcvprneuralskinning -
Invertible Neural Skinning Discovered by AI
2023
Introduces a pose-conditioned invertible neural network framework to learn skinning and deformation for clothed human avatars, preserving surface correspondences across different poses.
avatardeformationinvertible-networkneural-skinning -
Robust Skin Weights Transfer Discovered by AI
2023
An automated method for transferring skinning weights between 3D meshes of different topologies and shapes. It uses a weight inpainting formulation to smoothly propagate weights across mismatched regions, ensuring robust and high-quality deformation transfer.
inpaintingmayaskinningweight-transfer -
Robust Weight Transfer for Blender Discovered by AI
2023
An open-source Blender addon implementing the SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 paper "Robust Skin Weights Transfer via Weight Inpainting" to automatically and smoothly transfer skinning weights from a body mesh to clothing or accessories.
blenderinpaintingriggingweight-transfer -
SkinningNet Discovered by AI
2022
An end-to-end two-stream graph neural network architecture that computes skinning weights from an input mesh and its associated skeleton. It jointly learns the relationship between mesh vertices and skeleton joints without assuming a fixed skeleton topology or shape class.
gnnmeshriggingskinning -
HeterSkinNet Discovered by AI
2021
A deep learning-based method that automatically estimates skin weights for character models with diverse meshes and arbitrary skeletal morphologies using a heterogeneous graph network.
graph-neural-networkriggingskinning -
Neural Blend Shapes Discovered by AI
2021
A deep learning framework for automatic character rigging, skinning, and blend shape generation that handles arbitrary mesh connectivity and learns corrective pose-dependent shapes to address standard skinning artifacts.
blendshapesneuralriggingskinning -
Dem Bones Discovered by AI
2019
An automated algorithm developed by Electronic Arts to extract linear blend skinning (LBS) weights and bone transformations from a set of example mesh poses.
decompositionlbsskinningtool -
NeuroSkinning Discovered by AI
2019
A deep-learning-based method that automatically computes skin weights for skeleton-based deformation of production characters. It constructs a graph for the input character mesh and its skeleton hierarchy, feeding them into a graph convolutional network to predict the skin weight map.
gnnproductionriggingskinning
Proprietary / Industry Tools¶
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ActorCore AccuRIG Discovered by AI
2022
A free, standalone 3D character auto-rigging and skinning application developed by Reallusion that automates the process of placing joints and calculating skin weights for biped models.
auto-riggingreallusionriggingskinning -
ngSkinTools v2 Discovered by AI
2021
An industry-standard skinning plugin for Autodesk Maya that introduces layer-based weight painting, any-pose mirroring, enhanced paint brushes, and advanced smoothing algorithms.
mayapluginskinningweights -
ngSkinTools Discovered by AI
2020
An industry-standard layer-based skinning plugin for Autodesk Maya that introduces non-destructive layers, advanced mirroring, and enhanced paint brushes to streamline character weight painting.
layersmayapluginweight-painting -
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning Discovered by AI
2017
A popular commercial Blender addon that implements voxel-based heat diffusion skinning to overcome the limitations of Blender's native automatic weights, especially for overlapping geometries like clothing and hair.
blenderskinningvoxelweights
