ABSTRACTIn this paper, we introduce an approach to high‐level parameterisation of captured mesh sequences of actor performance for real‐time interactive animation control. High‐level parametric control is achieved by non‐linear blending between multiple mesh sequences exhibiting variation in a particular movement. For example, walking speed is parameterised by blending fast and slow walk sequences. A hybrid non‐linear mesh sequence blending approach is introduced to approximate the natural deformation of non‐linear interpolation techniques whilst maintaining the real‐time performance of linear mesh blending. Quantitative results show that the hybrid approach gives an accurate real‐time approximation of offline non‐linear deformation. An evaluation of the approach shows good performance not only for entire meshes but also with specific mesh areas. Results are presented for single and multi‐dimensional parametric control of walking (speed/direction), jumping (height/distance) and reaching (height) from captured mesh sequences. This approach allows continuous real‐time control of high‐level parameters such as speed and direction whilst maintaining the natural surface dynamics of captured movement. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.