We present a versatile, fast and simple framework to generate animations of scanned human characters from input optical motion capture data. Our method is purely meshbased and requires only a minimum of manual interaction. The only manual step needed to create moving virtual people is the placement of a sparse set of correspondences between the input data and the mesh to be animated. The proposed algorithm implicitly generates realistic body deformations, and can easily transfer motions between human subjects of completely different shape and proportions. We feature a working prototype system that demonstrates that our method can generate convincing lifelike character animations directly from optical motion capture data.