We propose a new approach to represent and manipulate
a mesh-based character animation preserving its timevarying
details. Our method first decomposes the input mesh
animation into coarse and fine deformation components. A model
for the coarse deformations is constructed by an underlying
kinematic skeleton structure and blending skinning weights.
Thereafter, a non-linear probabilistic model is used to encode the
fine time-varying details of the input animation. The user can
manipulate the corresponding skeleton-based component of the
input, which can be done by any standard animation package,
and the final result is generated including its important timevarying
details. By converting an input sample animation into our
new hybrid representation, we are able to maintain the flexibility
of mesh-based methods during animation creation while allowing
for practical manipulations using the standard skeleton-based
paradigm. We demonstrate the performance of our method by
converting and editing several mesh animations generated by
different performance capture approaches.