Object alignment techniques for animation

A method for aligning objects for computer generated imagery, the method comprising performing, by a computer system:

• obtaining a source object representation representing a source object and a target object representation representing a target object;
• identifying a category of the source object and a category of the target object, wherein identifying the category of the source object and identifying the category of the target object comprises providing the object representations to a classifier machine learning model, wherein the classifier machine learning model is a neural network comprising:
• an input layer for accepting an object representation corresponding to an object;
• two or more mixed diffusion and convolution layers;
• and
• an output layer for outputting a probability that the object is part of a particular category of objects;
• based on the category of the source object and the category of the target object, selecting a feature extraction machine learning model from a set of feature extraction machine learning models for different object categories;
• providing the source object representation and the target object representation as input to the selected feature extraction machine learning model;
• generating, by the feature extraction machine learning model, information identifying parts of the source object, information identifying parts of the target object, a shape vector for the source object, and a shape vector for the target object;
• and
• generating an aligned target object representation that is aligned with the source object representation and usable for animating the target object, the generating using an alignment machine learning model based on the information identifying parts of the source object, the information identifying parts of the target object, the shape vector for the source object, and the shape vector for the target object.