dem-bones VS appleseed

You can also try SSDR (“Smooth Skin Decomposition with Rigid Bones”). Something like this: electronicarts/dem-bones - GitHub https://github.com/electronicarts/dem-bones can help you in getting your skeleton to automatically animate (and automatically weighting your geometry) when you supply an skeleton and an Alembic file. I’d try this option first. There are different implementations of this solver (SOuP, vastSolver, a recent addon in Blender), but if you are comfortable with dealing with the command line you should be able to get something running just with this.

Blender DemBones is an add-on that integrates the open-source project DemBones. It is an automated algorithm that converts mesh animations to bone animations, which can be used for various tasks, including skinning or improving the skinning of rigged models, baking deformation cages, and corrective smooth modifiers. The add-on is fully integrated with DemBones and features such as demLock and partial solving through vertex color. There are six main use cases for the add-on, including converting mesh sequences to bone animations and weights, and partially solving skinning through per-vertex color of the mesh.

If we can offline it, then we will with VATs, geo-caches, or something like Dem-Bones to translate it into an approximation with bones.

for more reading, the submission from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13567594

It is MIT: https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/blob/master/LICENSE...

I'll ping you on Discord, we kinda know each other :)

For others who like opensource renderers: Appleseed (which Franz is lead developer of) is amazing, check it out! https://appleseedhq.net/