A motion library can be created by generating motion feature vectors for at least some of multiple frames of a video sequence using a 3D mesh, each motion feature vector corresponding to characteristics of the body deformation in one of the frames. The A user can select a subset of the frames. For each frame in the subset, the user can define settings for controls of an animation character, the settings selected by the user to correspond to the body deformation in the respective frame. Mappings are generated using the settings and the motion feature vectors, the mappings regulating the controls based on multiple motion feature vectors. The motion library can be used to generate an animation from an actor performance.