We introduce cut-cell skinning, a geometric prior designed to augment data-driven skinning weight generation. While data-driven methods show promise in producing high-quality skinning weights, they often lack the generalizability of classic geometric approaches. To bridge this gap, we propose a geometric prior that can be robustly computed for in-the-wild meshes and is efficient for large-scale machine learning workflows. The key idea of our cut-cell skinning is a fast graph-based approximation of the volumetric geodesics distances, motivated by their importance in classic skinning weight computation. Our method achieves orders of magnitude speedup compared to optimization-based solvers and remains resilient to topological artifacts common in cage- or voxel-based alternatives. We demonstrate the efficacy of the cut-cell skinning prior by integrating it into recent neural skinning models, showing consistent improvements across existing methods and achieving state-of-the-art results. Project page: https://wenchao-m.github.io/CutCell.github.io/
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.
Mesh subdivision is a fundamental operation for converting coarse, editable meshes into high-resolution surfaces, with broad applications in digital asset creation. Classical rule-based schemes rely on fixed local refinement rules and often produce over-smoothed surfaces. Recent neural subdivision methods improve detail synthesis, but remain constrained by local modeling and exhibit limited generalizability. We present SubdivAR, a neural mesh subdivision framework based on our proposed Mesh Autoregressive Representation (MAR). MAR arranges meshes at different subdivision levels into an ordered scale sequence, reformulating subdivision as autoregressive next-scale prediction. To support this formulation, we introduce a Hybrid Topology-Aware Transformer that combines global semantic attention with topology-constrained local feature aggregation. SubdivAR adopts a next-scale coordinate prediction paradigm, regressing vertex offsets at each refinement stage to preserve subdivision topology while recovering fine-grained geometric details. To enable reliable learning, we construct FII-40K, a curated dataset of nearly 40,000 high-quality meshes with multi-level subdivision supervision. Experiments show that SubdivAR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing Hausdorff Distance and Chamfer Distance by 18.8% and 14.2%, respectively, and demonstrates strong robustness on complex open-surface geometries.
We propose Skelebones, a Scaffold-Skin Rigging System built on three steps: (1) Bones compress temporally consistent Gaussian or mesh sequences into free-form bones with smooth skinning weights, approximating non-rigid deformations via linear blend skinning (LBS); (2) Skeleton extracts the Mean Curvature Skeleton (MCS) from the canonical shape and temporally refines its topology and kinematics into a compact skeletal structure; and (3) Binding connects the skeleton and bones through non-parametric Partwise Motion Matching (PartMM), which synthesizes novel bone motions by matching, retrieving, and blending existing ones. Together, these steps compress the dynamics of 4D shapes into compact skelebones that are simultaneously controllable and expressive. The resulting representation is category-agnostic, meaning template-free; motion-adaptive, with dynamic topology; and topology-correct, with a skeleton consistent with the surface geometry. PartMM requires no learning. We validate our method on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving substantial reanimation improvements on unseen poses: a 17.3 dB PSNR gain over LBS on DNA-Rendering and a 45.6 dB gain over Bag-of-Bones on ActorsHQ, while preserving high rendering fidelity for characters with complex non-rigid dynamics. PartMM generalizes robustly to both Gaussian and mesh representations, excelling in low-data regimes of approximately 1,000 frames, with a 48.4 RMSE improvement over LBS and improvements of more than 20 over GRU- and MLP-based methods. Code will be publicly released at https://cookmaker.cn/gaussianimate/.