# CharacterMixer: Rig-Aware Interpolation of 3D Characters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15580/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [AnimaMimic: Imitating 3D Animation from Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14133/) (2025)
- [Textured 3D Regenerative Morphing with 3D Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14316/) (2025)
- [How to Move Your Dragon: Text-to-Motion Synthesis for Large-Vocabulary Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04257/) (2025)
- [Interp3D: Correspondence-aware Interpolation for Generative Textured 3D Morphing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14103/) (2026)
- [MimiCAT: Mimic with Correspondence-Aware Cascade-Transformer for Category-Free 3D Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18370/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present CharacterMixer, a system for blending two rigged 3D characters with different mesh and skeleton topologies while maintaining a rig throughout interpolation. CharacterMixer also enables interpolation during motion for such characters, a novel feature. Interpolation is an important shape editing operation, but prior methods have limitations when applied to rigged characters: they either ignore the rig (making interpolated characters no longer posable) or use a fixed rig and mesh topology. To handle different mesh topologies, CharacterMixer uses a signed distance field (SDF) representation of character shapes, with one SDF per bone. To handle different skeleton topologies, it computes a hierarchical correspondence between source and target character skeletons and interpolates the SDFs of corresponding bones. This correspondence also allows the creation of a single "unified skeleton" for posing and animating interpolated characters. We show that CharacterMixer produces qualitatively better interpolation results than two state-of-the-art methods while preserving a rig throughout interpolation.