Abstract: Despite the huge progress made in interactive physics-based mesh deformation, manipulating a geometrically complex mesh or posing a detailed character is still a tedious and time-consuming task. Example-driven methods significantly simplify the modelling process by incorporating structural or anatomical knowledge learned from example poses. However, these approaches yield counter-intuitive, non-physical results as soon as the shape space spanned by the example poses is left. In this paper, we propose a modelling framework that is both example-driven and physics-based and thereby overcomes the limitations of both approaches. Based on an extension of the discrete shell energy we derive mesh deformation and mesh interpolation techniques that can be seamlessly combined into a simple and flexible mesh-based inverse kinematics system.