Is there anyway to change the anatomy of the generated SMPL models when training on new data?

[ritikasibal]

Hello!

I am looking to use SMPLx to generate 3D pose estimation from 2D monocular video. However, I want to modify the anatomy of the SMPL meshes (e.g. make arms longer than a human's would be, make knee to ankle shorter), without creating brand new meshes from scratch (as was done in https://smal.is.tue.mpg.de).

What is the best way to go about this? I have looked at the blender add-on and the unity funcitonality and while both let me modify the mesh shape and joints, I am unsure how they fit into the .pkl files we need to download (from https://smpl.is.tue.mpg.de) to run the actual 3D pose estimation. My end goal is to have accurate 3D meshes (obj files) of animals from 2D videos, and I think I can use to human meshes (with some anatomical changes) to do this, but am still a bit lost on how to modify the meshes to do this.