Machine learning could also be used in animation? Of course the anwser is a big YES. Notabely, used by the research of skinning mesh deformations, pioneered by Doug L. James and Christopher D. Twigg, see their paper entitled Skinning Mesh Animations presented in SIGGRAPH 2005. Later, Ladislav Kavan has proposed several methods of extracting the LBS model from a mesh sequence. However, they are again not suitable for rigging, as the bone transformations are not rigid.

Recent great breakthrough is achieved by Binh Huy Le and Zhigang Deng. They have extended to rigid bones, common to motion editing and skeleton extraction. Succeeded by their work presented in SIGGRAPH 2014, their skinning decomposition method now is largely improved, making it very promising to convert deformations as artist-friendly rigging.

In addition, skinning decomposition has another notable metrit: data compression. A LBS model of course meeds much lower storage than mesh sequences, in particuar for blendshapes model which is still the common solution for facial animation.

But, have to say, extracting a LBS model is bound by the input data which contains noisy, without a doublt. This is because the examplar poses often do not exist. They are obtained by handcraft, simulation or capturing.

Let’s say, in facial animation, seconday deformations are very neccesary to provide the realism. However, LBS is not efficient to reproduce such visual effects, in turn, it is of course not possible to learn a LBS model that will reproduce the deformations. So, we need to smooth out secondary deformations until we obtain the deformation details that can be reached by linear blend skinning. This will be very empirical.

Webber Huang [demo] has made a great demo, showing that using Delta Mush, a new smoothing technique that will be included in MAYA 2016, combined with skinning decomposition with rigid bones, has largely improved the performance, both in character deformation, and facial animation.