Rig-free animation for arbitrary non-rigged 3D objects

Develop animation methods that apply rigging-based animation principles, which are effective for humans and some animals, to arbitrary non-rigged 3D objects without requiring predefined skeletal structures or kinematic rigs.

Background

The paper highlights that traditional animation pipelines rely on explicit rigging and skeletal structures, which work well for humans and some animals but do not generalize to arbitrary objects that lack predefined kinematic structures. This limitation hinders broader, cross-category motion transfer and animation of diverse 3D assets, including those reconstructed as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) without an inherent motion structure.

Addressing this open challenge is central to enabling rigless, semantic motion transfer across categories. The work proposes a method leveraging motion embeddings from multiview video and a robust 4D consolidation stage to animate static 3DGS assets, but it frames the generalization of rigging principles to non-rigged objects as an open challenge in the field.