  Generative models for 3D geometric data arise in many important applications
in 3D computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we focus on 3D deformable
shapes that share a common topological structure, such as human faces and
bodies. Morphable Models and their variants, despite their linear formulation,
have been widely used for shape representation, while most of the recently
proposed nonlinear approaches resort to intermediate representations, such as
3D voxel grids or 2D views. In this work, we introduce a novel graph
convolutional operator, acting directly on the 3D mesh, that explicitly models
the inductive bias of the fixed underlying graph. This is achieved by enforcing
consistent local orderings of the vertices of the graph, through the spiral
operator, thus breaking the permutation invariance property that is adopted by
all the prior work on Graph Neural Networks. Our operator comes by construction
with desirable properties (anisotropic, topology-aware, lightweight,
easy-to-optimise), and by using it as a building block for traditional deep
generative architectures, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on a variety
of 3D shape datasets compared to the linear Morphable Model and other graph
convolutional operators.
