Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models

TL;DR

Puppeteer is a comprehensive framework that automates rigging and animation of diverse 3D models using advanced transformer and attention-based architectures, significantly improving accuracy and efficiency in content creation pipelines.

Contribution

It introduces novel auto-regressive and attention-based models for automatic rigging and animation, reducing expert intervention and enhancing quality across various 3D assets.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in skeletal prediction accuracy

Achieves higher skinning quality with topology-aware attention

Produces stable, temporally coherent animations

Abstract

Modern interactive applications increasingly demand dynamic 3D content, yet the transformation of static 3D models into animated assets constitutes a significant bottleneck in content creation pipelines. While recent advances in generative AI have revolutionized static 3D model creation, rigging and animation continue to depend heavily on expert intervention. We present Puppeteer, a comprehensive framework that addresses both automatic rigging and animation for diverse 3D objects. Our system first predicts plausible skeletal structures via an auto-regressive transformer that introduces a joint-based tokenization strategy for compact representation and a hierarchical ordering methodology with stochastic perturbation that enhances bidirectional learning capabilities. It then infers skinning weights via an attention-based architecture incorporating topology-aware joint attention that explicitly encodes inter-joint relationships based on skeletal graph distances. Finally, we complement these rigging advances with a differentiable optimization-based animation pipeline that generates stable, high-fidelity animations while being computationally more efficient than existing approaches. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both skeletal prediction accuracy and skinning quality. The system robustly processes diverse 3D content, ranging from professionally designed game assets to AI-generated shapes, producing temporally coherent animations that eliminate the jittering issues common in existing methods.