---
library_name: onnxruntime
tags:
  - animation
  - character-animation
  - inverse-kinematics
  - pose-estimation
  - onnx
license: other
---

# Animatica Autoposer (SOMA-30)

A neural autoposer for full-body character rigs. Give it a handful of handles — where a hand
should be, where the feet are planted, which way the head looks — and it returns a complete,
natural pose for a 30-joint skeleton. It is what makes posing in the
[Animatica](https://animatica.ai) Blender add-on feel like moving a character rather than
rotating thirty bones.

It is a **poser, not an animator**: one pose per call, a few milliseconds each, no motion model
and no temporal state. Ask it once per frame and you have an editable animation; ask it once and
you have a pose.

## What you give it

Any number of effectors, in any combination. Each carries a **tolerance** — metres of slack — so
a handle can be an exact pin or a loose suggestion the model may overrule to keep the body
plausible.

| Effector | Type id | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Position | `0` | xyz | put this joint here |
| Rotation | `1` | 6D rotation | orient this joint like this |
| Look-at | `2` | xyz + direction | aim this joint at this point |

Plus a **body descriptor**: 29 bone lengths, z-scored. The same effectors solve correctly on a
child, a heavyset adult, or a giant, because proportion is an input rather than an assumption.

Three position effectors is the sparsest input it was trained to answer well; one or two will
return something, but the body below them is mostly prior.

## What you get back

- **draft joint positions** — `[B, 90]`, the 30 joints as xyz, root first
- **6D rotations** — `[B, 180]`, per joint, for FK on your own skeleton

Run the rotations through SOMA-30 forward kinematics with your body's neutral joints to get world
positions. The bundled IK pass (below) then pins the effectors exactly and keeps the feet out of
the floor.

## Use it in Blender

The Animatica add-on downloads this repository on first use and needs no token or manual setup —
handles appear on your rig and you drag them. That is the shortest path to using this model, and
the one it is tuned for.

## Use it directly (ONNX)

`onnx/` is the runtime bundle: two graphs and the metadata that describes them.

```python
import json, numpy as np, onnxruntime as ort
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download

d = snapshot_download("Animatica-ai/autoposer", allow_patterns=["onnx/*"])
meta = json.load(open(f"{d}/onnx/meta.json"))
poser = ort.InferenceSession(f"{d}/onnx/poser.onnx")

E = 3                                             # three handles: hips and both hands
val = np.zeros((1, E, 7), np.float32)             # 6 value channels + 1 tolerance
val[0, 0, :3], val[0, 0, 6] = (0.0, 0.95, 0.0), 0.005
val[0, 1, :3], val[0, 1, 6] = (0.35, 1.20, 0.20), 0.005
val[0, 2, :3], val[0, 2, 6] = (-0.35, 1.20, 0.20), 0.005

draft, rot6d = poser.run(None, {
    "val":       val,
    "weights":   np.ones((1, E), np.float32),                        # encoder blending weights
    "joint_id":  np.array([[0, 13, 19]], np.int64),                  # Hips, LeftHand, RightHand
    "eff_type":  np.zeros((1, E), np.int64),                         # all positions
    "cond":      np.zeros((1, 29), np.float32),                      # z-scored bone lengths
})
```

Two details the graph will not tell you, and which decide whether the output is a pose or a heap:

- **Reference frame.** Position and look-at values are expressed relative to the centroid of the
  position targets. This checkpoint is floor-referenced (`floor_ref: true`), so **y stays
  absolute** — the ground is a real height, not something relative — and the centroid is zeroed
  on y before subtracting.
- **Conditioning.** `cond` is the 29 bone lengths, z-scored with `blen_mean` / `blen_std` from
  `meta.json` and clamped to ±4.5. Zeros mean "the average body the statistics describe", which
  is why the snippet above works at all.

### The IK pass

`onnx/ik.onnx` is a damped least-squares refinement that runs after the network: it pins
effectors to the tolerance you asked for, holds a floor plane, and rolls the toes rather than
sinking the feet. Twelve iterations over a damping ladder, accepting per step. The network gets
the pose right; this makes the handles exact.

`meta.json` carries a **selftest** — recorded inputs and expected outputs — so a miscompiled
graph is detectable. It matters more than it sounds: a bad kernel fusion does not raise, it
quietly returns a wrong pose. Run the IK graph on `selftest.inputs` and compare against
`selftest.expect`; agreement should be well under half a centimetre.

## Use it directly (PyTorch)

`model.safetensors` + `config.json` are the training weights, for research use and for anyone who
wants to fine-tune. `config.json` records the skeleton (`njoints`, `ux`/`ux_names`), the
conditioning width (`cond_dim: 29`), floor referencing, and the training step.

## The skeleton

30 joints, root first:

```
Hips  Spine1  Spine2  Chest  Neck1  Neck2  Head  Jaw  LeftEye  RightEye
LeftShoulder  LeftArm  LeftForeArm  LeftHand  LeftHandThumbEnd  LeftHandMiddleEnd
RightShoulder RightArm RightForeArm RightHand RightHandThumbEnd RightHandMiddleEnd
LeftLeg  LeftShin  LeftFoot  LeftToeBase
RightLeg RightShin RightFoot RightToeBase
```

`meta.json` has the parent list, the neutral (rest) joint positions, the four foot joints used by
the floor term, and the effector joint ids.

## How it works

Each effector is embedded from its value, tolerance, joint id and type, and the set is blended by
weight into a single pose code — so the model takes any number of handles in any order, rather
than a fixed rig of them. Two-stage decoding follows: draft joint positions first, then per-joint
6D rotations, which is what keeps limbs attached to a body of the right proportions instead of
merely near the handles. The body descriptor is injected twice, at the encoder alongside each
effector and again at the decoder embedding (zero-initialised, so it starts as a no-op and is
learned into).

## Files

| File | Size | What |
|---|---|---|
| `onnx/poser.onnx` | 142 MB | the network |
| `onnx/ik.onnx` | 1.9 MB | the IK refinement pass |
| `onnx/meta.json` | 19 KB | skeleton, normalisation stats, checksums, selftest |
| `model.safetensors` | — | PyTorch weights |
| `config.json` | — | training configuration |

## Limitations

- **One pose at a time.** There is no temporal model: consecutive frames are consistent because
  consecutive effectors are, not because the model remembers anything.
- **SOMA-30 only.** Other skeletons need retargeting onto these 30 joints first.
- **Hands and face are along for the ride.** Fingers are a thumb and middle tip per hand; jaw and
  eyes are in the skeleton but are not meaningfully posed.
- **Fewer than three position effectors** leaves most of the body to the prior. It will answer;
  it just has little to answer from.
- **Floor-referenced.** Feed it absolute heights. A pose built in a different vertical frame will
  come back crouching or floating.

---

Made by [Animatica](https://animatica.ai). Found something odd? Tell us — the model and the
add-on move together, and a pose that comes out wrong is usually interesting.