  Animating an object in 3D often requires an articulated structure, e.g. a
kinematic chain or skeleton of the manipulated object with proper skinning
weights, to obtain smooth movements and surface deformations. However, existing
models that allow direct pose manipulations are either limited to specific
object categories or built with specialized equipment. To reduce the work
needed for creating animatable 3D models, we propose a novel reconstruction
method that learns an animatable kinematic chain for any articulated object.
Our method operates on monocular videos without prior knowledge of the object's
shape or underlying structure. Our approach is on par with state-of-the-art 3D
surface reconstruction methods on various articulated object categories while
enabling direct pose manipulations by re-posing the learned kinematic chain.
