  3D geometric contents are becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, we
study the problem of analyzing deforming 3D meshes using deep neural networks.
Deforming 3D meshes are flexible to represent 3D animation sequences as well as
collections of objects of the same category, allowing diverse shapes with
large-scale non-linear deformations. We propose a novel framework which we call
mesh variational autoencoders (mesh VAE), to explore the probabilistic latent
space of 3D surfaces. The framework is easy to train, and requires very few
training examples. We also propose an extended model which allows flexibly
adjusting the significance of different latent variables by altering the prior
distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our general framework is
able to learn a reasonable representation for a collection of deformable
shapes, and produce competitive results for a variety of applications,
including shape generation, shape interpolation, shape space embedding and
shape exploration, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
