A method for generating approximated mesh deformations of a character model comprising one or more mesh elements and a first structural element of a plurality of structural elements, wherein the plurality of structural elements correspond to bone representations of a skeleton of the model and the one or more mesh elements correspond to vertices of a mesh of the model, wherein the one or more mesh elements are assigned to the first structural element, the method comprising: retrieving vertex and bone assignment values that assign each vertex to a single corresponding bone representation; retrieving model parameters for the character model, the retrieved model parameters comprising, for each bone representation of the skeleton, respective model parameters, the model parameters including values for neural network weight matrices W i and neural network parameters b i derived from a neural network, wherein the retrieved neural network weight matrices W i and neural network parameters b i are determined by training the neural network on a set of training data comprising deformation positions of the one or more mesh elements defined with respect to the first structural elements resulting from transformations applied to the first structural element, wherein the transformations are pose transformations comprising rotations and/or translations; applying a transformation to the first structural element; applying a first deformation function to the one or more mesh elements, based on a transformation matrix of the transformation applied to the first structural element, to determine a linear deformation position of the one or more mesh elements; generating an offset for the one or more mesh elements, using a second deformation function provided by a neural network utilizing the transformation matrix of the transformation applied to the first structural element and the respective model parameters, wherein the offset is a positional offset of the one or more mesh elements from the linear deformation position to a target position corresponding to the transformation applied to the first structural element; and generating a combined mesh deformation for the one or more mesh elements by combining the linear deformation position of the first deformation function and the offset of the second deformation function. retrieving vertex and bone assignment values that assign each vertex to a single corresponding bone representation; retrieving model parameters for the character model, the retrieved model parameters comprising, for each bone representation of the skeleton, respective model parameters, the model parameters including values for neural network weight matrices W i and neural network parameters b i derived from a neural network, wherein the retrieved neural network weight matrices W i and neural network parameters b i are determined by training the neural network on a set of training data comprising deformation positions of the one or more mesh elements defined with respect to the first structural elements resulting from transformations applied to the first structural element, wherein the transformations are pose transformations comprising rotations and/or translations; applying a transformation to the first structural element; applying a first deformation function to the one or more mesh elements, based on a transformation matrix of the transformation applied to the first structural element, to determine a linear deformation position of the one or more mesh elements; generating an offset for the one or more mesh elements, using a second deformation function provided by a neural network utilizing the transformation matrix of the transformation applied to the first structural element and the respective model parameters, wherein the offset is a positional offset of the one or more mesh elements from the linear deformation position to a target position corresponding to the transformation applied to the first structural element; and generating a combined mesh deformation for the one or more mesh elements by combining the linear deformation position of the first deformation function and the offset of the second deformation function.