  Posing high-contact interactions is challenging and time-consuming, with
hand-object interactions being especially difficult due to the large number of
degrees of freedom (DOF) of the hand and the fact that humans are experts at
judging hand poses. This paper addresses this challenge by elevating contact
areas to first-class primitives. We provide \textit{end-to-end art-directable}
(EAD) tools to model interactions based on contact areas, directly manipulate
contact areas, and compute corresponding poses automatically. To make these
operations intuitive and fast, we present a novel axis-based contact model that
supports real-time approximately isometry-preserving operations on triangulated
surfaces, permits movement between surfaces, and is both robust and scalable to
large areas. We show that use of our contact model facilitates high quality
posing even for unconstrained, high-DOF custom rigs intended for traditional
keyframe-based animation pipelines. We additionally evaluate our approach with
comparisons to prior art, ablation studies, user studies, qualitative
assessments, and extensions to full-body interaction.

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