LatentReRig: An SDF-Based VAE with Dual Decoders for Latent-Space Deformation Conditioning

Abstract

Transferring deformation between characters with different geometry and topology is challenging because conventional rigs encode behaviour through character-specific structures and correspondences. We present LatentReRig, an experimental framework that investigates whether pose-associated changes can instead be represented as reusable directions in a learned geometric latent space. An SDF-based variational autoencoder is coupled with two decoders: one reconstructs the implicit field, while the other predicts target vertex positions from source geometry and latent deformation conditioning. The source geometry may be neutral or already deformed. Experiments on a controlled humanoid dataset show that several poses induce coherent latent directions across identities, particularly for broad articulated motions. These signals can guide deformation of unseen characters, but explicit predictions remain less accurate for localized changes and corrective contributions. Diagnostic comparisons with repeated SDF sampling show that inter-identity distances exceed same-geometry resampling variability on average, while pose signals exhibit different margins above this baseline. The results support the presence of reusable pose-related structure and identify stable local conditioning and accurate mesh decoding as complementary requirements for improving transfer.