jasongzy/Make-It-Animatable

What it solves

Make-It-Animatable (MIA) provides an efficient framework for creating animation-ready 3D characters. It automates the process of rigging—the creation of a skeletal structure (bones) and the assignment of skinning weights (which parts of the mesh move with which bone)—which is traditionally a labor-intensive manual process for 3D artists.

How it works

The framework uses a neural network to predict the necessary components for animation: joint positions, skinning weights, and poses. In its latest version (v2), it leverages the Hunyuan3D 2.1 ShapeVAE backbone to process mesh inputs and predict these animation parameters. The system can be trained on datasets like Mixamo to learn how to map 3D shapes to skeletal structures.

Who it’s for

3D artists, game developers, and researchers in computer vision and graphics who need to quickly transform static 3D meshes into characters that can be animated using standard skeletal animation pipelines.

Highlights

• Automated Rigging: Predicts joints and skinning weights directly from 3D mesh inputs.
• Blender Integration: Includes tools for post-processing and global-transform restoration within Blender.
• Generalization: Trained on diverse datasets, including the 3DBiCar dataset, to handle characters with unusual body proportions.
• Efficient Training: Supports separate training for weights, bones, and poses to optimize VRAM usage and flexibility.