Abstract: Proposed in this paper is an example based synthesis approach to create 3D animation of a target character interactively on the basis of sketch based 3D animation transfer. Users can add new creative idea to their works while reserving the styles of source animations. This approach consists of the following steps: 1)inputting pairs of sketches to source and target meshes, and building correspondences between the sources and target; 2)inputting control points on the target mesh; and 3)adjusting the control points interactively, calculating the weights of each key frame of source animations and creating an optimized deformed target mesh according to the control points. The authors provide new research contributions to all these topics, and integrate them into the newly developed prototype animating system, which is an easy-to-use interactive animating tool and not limited to trained experts. This approach is general and does not require the sources and target to share the same number of vertices or triangles, or to have matching connectivity. The above approach is intuitive and able to produce highly authentic 3D animations. The approach is demonstrated by constructing different examples according to a series of key frames of different sources and different number of control points to illustrate the feasibility.