Animator-Centric Skeleton Generation on Objects with Fine-Grained Details

Mingze Sun, Cheng Zeng, Jiansong Pei, Junhao Chen, Chaoyue Song, Shaohui Wang, Tianyuan Chang, Bin Huang, Zijiao Zeng, Ruqi Huang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 17336-17345

Skeleton generation is essential for animating 3D assets, but current deep learning methods remain limited: they cannot handle the growing structural complexity of modern models and offer minimal controllability, creating a major bottleneck for real-world animation workflows. To address this, we propose an animator-centric SG framework that achieves high-quality skeleton prediction on complex inputs while providing intuitive control handles. Our contributions are threefold. First, we curate a large-scale dataset of 82,633 rigged meshes with diverse and complicated structures. Second, we introduce a novel semantic-aware tokenization scheme for auto-regressive modeling. This scheme effectively complements purely geometric prior methods by subdividing bones into semantically meaningful groups, thereby enhancing robustness to structural complexity and enabling a key control mechanism. Third, we design a learnable density interval module that allows animators to exert soft, direct control over bone density. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework not only generates high-quality skeletons for challenging inputs but also successfully fulfills two critical requirements from professional animators. Our work paves the way for more flexible and efficient animation pipelines.