Panda Mei represents a radical divergence from traditional rigging techniques, and is the first deployment of a collaborative project between research and production: the profile mover and curve-nets. For this character we authored a sparse network of bezier or catmull-rom curve nets representing key artistic shapes, which are then posed using the rig. Then the profile mover, using this curve network as an input, poses the mesh while preserving surface detail and layering with traditional deformations.

This approach provided many advantages, mainly: abstraction from the connectivity of the surface, significantly sparser inputs to deformation, ease of solving overlapping joint-based sculpts, and exposing the curve-net as a shot-based interface for additional animation shaping.