Daily Papers

While frontier coding agents can generate high-quality 3D scenes and articulated assets, they struggle to create coherent long-horizon animations. When equipped with general-purpose harnesses, they frequently produce physically implausible outputs, generating objects that interpenetrate, lack physical support, or move unnaturally. Such bare agents struggle to repair these errors because they default to scripting the full animation in one pass, making it difficult to verify their work and disentangle complex spatiotemporal constraints. Drawing on the practice of human animators, we introduce DyCraft, a system for animated 3D scene generation that breaks animation into steps that coding agents can more reliably solve. DyCraft first expands the user's prompt into a detailed plan and builds a static scene. It then creates a 3D storyboard of key animation poses, where each frame is a static 3D scene that the agent can build and debug in isolation. Storyboarding decomposes the problem into pairs of verified start and end states, allowing the agent to author local motion between them with a collection of motion authoring tools. We evaluate DyCraft on 24 long-horizon, multi-shot animation tasks covering humanoid robots, human and animal characters, and physical mechanisms. Compared with a native GPT-6 agent in Codex and prior agentic baselines, DyCraft substantially reduces physical violations and generates higher-quality animated 3D scenes that are more often preferred by human raters.

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D facial motions from audio sequences using key motion embeddings. Despite recent advancements in data-driven techniques, accurately mapping between audio signals and 3D facial meshes remains challenging. Direct regression of the entire sequence often leads to over-smoothed results due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. To this end, we propose a progressive learning mechanism that generates 3D facial animations by introducing key motion capture to decrease cross-modal mapping uncertainty and learning complexity. Concretely, our method integrates linguistic and data-driven priors through two modules: the linguistic-based key motion acquisition and the cross-modal motion completion. The former identifies key motions and learns the associated 3D facial expressions, ensuring accurate lip-speech synchronization. The latter extends key motions into a full sequence of 3D talking faces guided by audio features, improving temporal coherence and audio-visual consistency. Extensive experimental comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating more vivid and consistent talking face animations. Consistent enhancements in results through the integration of our proposed learning scheme with existing methods underscore the efficacy of our approach. Our code and weights will be at the project website: https://github.com/ffxzh/KMTalk.

Despite significant progress in 3D avatar reconstruction, it still faces challenges such as high time complexity, sensitivity to data quality, and low data utilization. We propose FastAvatar, a feedforward 3D avatar framework capable of flexibly leveraging diverse daily recordings (e.g., a single image, multi-view observations, or monocular video) to reconstruct a high-quality 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model within seconds, using only a single unified model. FastAvatar's core is a Large Gaussian Reconstruction Transformer featuring three key designs: First, a variant VGGT-style transformer architecture aggregating multi-frame cues while injecting initial 3D prompt to predict an aggregatable canonical 3DGS representation; Second, multi-granular guidance encoding (camera pose, FLAME expression, head pose) mitigating animation-induced misalignment for variable-length inputs; Third, incremental Gaussian aggregation via landmark tracking and sliced fusion losses. Integrating these features, FastAvatar enables incremental reconstruction, i.e., improving quality with more observations, unlike prior work wasting input data. This yields a quality-speed-tunable paradigm for highly usable avatar modeling. Extensive experiments show that FastAvatar has higher quality and highly competitive speed compared to existing methods.

Existing for audio- and pose-driven human animation methods often struggle with stiff head movements and blurry hands, primarily due to the weak correlation between audio and head movements and the structural complexity of hands. To address these issues, we propose VividAnimator, an end-to-end framework for generating high-quality, half-body human animations driven by audio and sparse hand pose conditions. Our framework introduces three key innovations. First, to overcome the instability and high cost of online codebook training, we pre-train a Hand Clarity Codebook (HCC) that encodes rich, high-fidelity hand texture priors, significantly mitigating hand degradation. Second, we design a Dual-Stream Audio-Aware Module (DSAA) to model lip synchronization and natural head pose dynamics separately while enabling interaction. Third, we introduce a Pose Calibration Trick (PCT) that refines and aligns pose conditions by relaxing rigid constraints, ensuring smooth and natural gesture transitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Vivid Animator achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing videos with superior hand detail, gesture realism, and identity consistency, validated by both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations.

Image-to-video(I2V) generation aims to create a video sequence from a single image, which requires high temporal coherence and visual fidelity with the source image.However, existing approaches suffer from character appearance inconsistency and poor preservation of fine details. Moreover, they require a large amount of video data for training, which can be computationally demanding.To address these limitations,we propose PoseAnimate, a novel zero-shot I2V framework for character animation.PoseAnimate contains three key components: 1) Pose-Aware Control Module (PACM) incorporates diverse pose signals into conditional embeddings, to preserve character-independent content and maintain precise alignment of actions.2) Dual Consistency Attention Module (DCAM) enhances temporal consistency, and retains character identity and intricate background details.3) Mask-Guided Decoupling Module (MGDM) refines distinct feature perception, improving animation fidelity by decoupling the character and background.We also propose a Pose Alignment Transition Algorithm (PATA) to ensure smooth action transition.Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art training-based methods in terms of character consistency and detail fidelity. Moreover, it maintains a high level of temporal coherence throughout the generated animations.

Achieving character animation that meets studio-grade production standards remains challenging despite recent progress. Existing approaches can transfer motion from a driving video to a reference image, but often fail to preserve structural fidelity and temporal consistency in wild scenarios involving complex motion and cross-identity animations. In this work, we present SCAIL (Studio-grade Character Animation via In-context Learning), a framework designed to address these challenges from two key innovations. First, we propose a novel 3D pose representation, providing a more robust and flexible motion signal. Second, we introduce a full-context pose injection mechanism within a diffusion-transformer architecture, enabling effective spatio-temporal reasoning over full motion sequences. To align with studio-level requirements, we develop a curated data pipeline ensuring both diversity and quality, and establish a comprehensive benchmark for systematic evaluation. Experiments show that SCAIL achieves state-of-the-art performance and advances character animation toward studio-grade reliability and realism.

We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

Human image animation aims to generate human videos of given characters and backgrounds that adhere to the desired pose sequence. However, existing methods focus more on human actions while neglecting the generation of background, which typically leads to static results or inharmonious movements. The community has explored camera pose-guided animation tasks, yet preparing the camera trajectory is impractical for most entertainment applications and ordinary users. As a remedy, we present an AnimateAnywhere framework, rousing the background in human image animation without requirements on camera trajectories. In particular, based on our key insight that the movement of the human body often reflects the motion of the background, we introduce a background motion learner (BML) to learn background motions from human pose sequences. To encourage the model to learn more accurate cross-frame correspondences, we further deploy an epipolar constraint on the 3D attention map. Specifically, the mask used to suppress geometrically unreasonable attention is carefully constructed by combining an epipolar mask and the current 3D attention map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AnimateAnywhere effectively learns the background motion from human pose sequences, achieving state-of-the-art performance in generating human animation results with vivid and realistic backgrounds. The source code and model will be available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/AnimateAnywhere.

Character animation is a transformative field in computer graphics and vision, enabling dynamic and realistic video animations from static images. Despite advancements, maintaining appearance consistency in animations remains a challenge. Our approach addresses this by introducing a training-free framework that ensures the generated video sequence preserves the reference image's subtleties, such as physique and proportions, through a dual alignment strategy. We decouple skeletal and motion priors from pose information, enabling precise control over animation generation. Our method also improves pixel-level alignment for conditional control from the reference character, enhancing the temporal consistency and visual cohesion of animations. Our method significantly enhances the quality of video generation without the need for large datasets or expensive computational resources.

Recent advances in diffusion models have greatly improved pose-driven character animation. However, existing methods are limited to spatially aligned reference-pose pairs with matched skeletal structures. Handling reference-pose misalignment remains unsolved. To address this, we present One-to-All Animation, a unified framework for high-fidelity character animation and image pose transfer for references with arbitrary layouts. First, to handle spatially misaligned reference, we reformulate training as a self-supervised outpainting task that transforms diverse-layout reference into a unified occluded-input format. Second, to process partially visible reference, we design a reference extractor for comprehensive identity feature extraction. Further, we integrate hybrid reference fusion attention to handle varying resolutions and dynamic sequence lengths. Finally, from the perspective of generation quality, we introduce identity-robust pose control that decouples appearance from skeletal structure to mitigate pose overfitting, and a token replace strategy for coherent long-video generation. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing approaches. The code and model are available at https://github.com/ssj9596/One-to-All-Animation.

Character image animation is gaining significant importance across various domains, driven by the demand for robust and flexible multi-subject rendering. While existing methods excel in single-person animation, they struggle to handle arbitrary subject counts, diverse character types, and spatial misalignment between the reference image and the driving poses. We attribute these limitations to an overly rigid spatial binding that forces strict pixel-wise alignment between the pose and reference, and an inability to consistently rebind motion to intended subjects. To address these challenges, we propose CoDance, a novel Unbind-Rebind framework that enables the animation of arbitrary subject counts, types, and spatial configurations conditioned on a single, potentially misaligned pose sequence. Specifically, the Unbind module employs a novel pose shift encoder to break the rigid spatial binding between the pose and the reference by introducing stochastic perturbations to both poses and their latent features, thereby compelling the model to learn a location-agnostic motion representation. To ensure precise control and subject association, we then devise a Rebind module, leveraging semantic guidance from text prompts and spatial guidance from subject masks to direct the learned motion to intended characters. Furthermore, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new multi-subject CoDanceBench. Extensive experiments on CoDanceBench and existing datasets show that CoDance achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting remarkable generalization across diverse subjects and spatial layouts. The code and weights will be open-sourced.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Furthermore, previous methods could only generate videos with static backgrounds, which limits the realism of the videos. For the first challenge, our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X++, a universal animation framework based on DiT for various character types, including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of DiT by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. For the second challenge, we introduce a multi-task training strategy that jointly trains the animation and TI2V tasks. Combined with the proposed partial parameter training, this approach achieves not only character animation but also text-driven background dynamics, making the videos more realistic. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X++ on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X++.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X, a universal animation framework based on LDM for various character types (collectively named X), including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of LDM by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A^2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Character image animation aims to synthesize high-fidelity videos by transferring motion from a driving sequence to a static reference image. Despite recent advancements, existing methods suffer from two fundamental challenges: (1) suboptimal motion injection strategies that lead to a trade-off between identity preservation and motion consistency, manifesting as a "see-saw", and (2) an over-reliance on explicit pose priors (e.g., skeletons), which inadequately capture intricate dynamics and hinder generalization to arbitrary, non-humanoid characters. To address these challenges, we present DreamActor-M2, a universal animation framework that reimagines motion conditioning as an in-context learning problem. Our approach follows a two-stage paradigm. First, we bridge the input modality gap by fusing reference appearance and motion cues into a unified latent space, enabling the model to jointly reason about spatial identity and temporal dynamics by leveraging the generative prior of foundational models. Second, we introduce a self-bootstrapped data synthesis pipeline that curates pseudo cross-identity training pairs, facilitating a seamless transition from pose-dependent control to direct, end-to-end RGB-driven animation. This strategy significantly enhances generalization across diverse characters and motion scenarios. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we further introduce AW Bench, a versatile benchmark encompassing a wide spectrum of characters types and motion scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamActor-M2 achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior visual fidelity and robust cross-domain generalization. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M2/

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, an framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To archive the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

Posing 3D characters is a fundamental task in computer graphics and vision. However, existing methods like auto-rigging and pose-conditioned generation often struggle with challenges such as inaccurate skinning weight prediction, topological imperfections, and poor pose conformance, limiting their robustness and generalizability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Make-It-Poseable, a novel feed-forward framework that reformulates character posing as a latent-space transformation problem. Instead of deforming mesh vertices as in traditional pipelines, our method reconstructs the character in new poses by directly manipulating its latent representation. At the core of our method is a latent posing transformer that manipulates shape tokens based on skeletal motion. This process is facilitated by a dense pose representation for precise control. To ensure high-fidelity geometry and accommodate topological changes, we also introduce a latent-space supervision strategy and an adaptive completion module. Our method demonstrates superior performance in posing quality. It also naturally extends to 3D editing applications like part replacement and refinement.

Image animation consists of generating a video sequence so that an object in a source image is animated according to the motion of a driving video. Our framework addresses this problem without using any annotation or prior information about the specific object to animate. Once trained on a set of videos depicting objects of the same category (e.g. faces, human bodies), our method can be applied to any object of this class. To achieve this, we decouple appearance and motion information using a self-supervised formulation. To support complex motions, we use a representation consisting of a set of learned keypoints along with their local affine transformations. A generator network models occlusions arising during target motions and combines the appearance extracted from the source image and the motion derived from the driving video. Our framework scores best on diverse benchmarks and on a variety of object categories. Our source code is publicly available.

Pose-controllable character video generation is in high demand with extensive applications for fields such as automatic advertising and content creation on social media platforms. While existing character image animation methods using pose sequences and reference images have shown promising performance, they tend to struggle with incoherent animation in complex scenarios, such as multiple character animation and body occlusion. Additionally, current methods request large-scale high-quality videos with stable backgrounds and temporal consistency as training datasets, otherwise, their performance will greatly deteriorate. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of character image animation tools. In this paper, we propose a practical and robust framework Follow-Your-Pose v2, which can be trained on noisy open-sourced videos readily available on the internet. Multi-condition guiders are designed to address the challenges of background stability, body occlusion in multi-character generation, and consistency of character appearance. Moreover, to fill the gap of fair evaluation of multi-character pose animation, we propose a new benchmark comprising approximately 4,000 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a margin of over 35\% across 2 datasets and on 7 metrics. Meanwhile, qualitative assessments reveal a significant improvement in the quality of generated video, particularly in scenarios involving complex backgrounds and body occlusion of multi-character, suggesting the superiority of our approach.

Human pose information is a critical component in many downstream image processing tasks, such as activity recognition and motion tracking. Likewise, a pose estimator for the illustrated character domain would provide a valuable prior for assistive content creation tasks, such as reference pose retrieval and automatic character animation. But while modern data-driven techniques have substantially improved pose estimation performance on natural images, little work has been done for illustrations. In our work, we bridge this domain gap by efficiently transfer-learning from both domain-specific and task-specific source models. Additionally, we upgrade and expand an existing illustrated pose estimation dataset, and introduce two new datasets for classification and segmentation subtasks. We then apply the resultant state-of-the-art character pose estimator to solve the novel task of pose-guided illustration retrieval. All data, models, and code will be made publicly available.

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.

Recent character image animation methods based on diffusion models, such as Animate Anyone, have made significant progress in generating consistent and generalizable character animations. However, these approaches fail to produce reasonable associations between characters and their environments. To address this limitation, we introduce Animate Anyone 2, aiming to animate characters with environment affordance. Beyond extracting motion signals from source video, we additionally capture environmental representations as conditional inputs. The environment is formulated as the region with the exclusion of characters and our model generates characters to populate these regions while maintaining coherence with the environmental context. We propose a shape-agnostic mask strategy that more effectively characterizes the relationship between character and environment. Furthermore, to enhance the fidelity of object interactions, we leverage an object guider to extract features of interacting objects and employ spatial blending for feature injection. We also introduce a pose modulation strategy that enables the model to handle more diverse motion patterns. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

In this paper, we present FaceShot, a novel training-free portrait animation framework designed to bring any character into life from any driven video without fine-tuning or retraining. We achieve this by offering precise and robust reposed landmark sequences from an appearance-guided landmark matching module and a coordinate-based landmark retargeting module. Together, these components harness the robust semantic correspondences of latent diffusion models to produce facial motion sequence across a wide range of character types. After that, we input the landmark sequences into a pre-trained landmark-driven animation model to generate animated video. With this powerful generalization capability, FaceShot can significantly extend the application of portrait animation by breaking the limitation of realistic portrait landmark detection for any stylized character and driven video. Also, FaceShot is compatible with any landmark-driven animation model, significantly improving overall performance. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed character benchmark CharacBench confirm that FaceShot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across any character domain. More results are available at our project website https://faceshot2024.github.io/faceshot/.

Transformers have recently been shown to generate high quality images from text input. However, the existing method of pose conditioning using skeleton image tokens is computationally inefficient and generate low quality images. Therefore we propose a new method; Keypoint Pose Encoding (KPE); KPE is 10 times more memory efficient and over 73% faster at generating high quality images from text input conditioned on the pose. The pose constraint improves the image quality and reduces errors on body extremities such as arms and legs. The additional benefits include invariance to changes in the target image domain and image resolution, making it easily scalable to higher resolution images. We demonstrate the versatility of KPE by generating photorealistic multiperson images derived from the DeepFashion dataset. We also introduce a evaluation method People Count Error (PCE) that is effective in detecting error in generated human images.

Animating a newly designed character using motion capture (mocap) data is a long standing problem in computer animation. A key consideration is the skeletal structure that should correspond to the available mocap data, and the shape deformation in the joint regions, which often requires a tailored, pose-specific refinement. In this work, we develop a neural technique for articulating 3D characters using enveloping with a pre-defined skeletal structure which produces high quality pose dependent deformations. Our framework learns to rig and skin characters with the same articulation structure (e.g., bipeds or quadrupeds), and builds the desired skeleton hierarchy into the network architecture. Furthermore, we propose neural blend shapes--a set of corrective pose-dependent shapes which improve the deformation quality in the joint regions in order to address the notorious artifacts resulting from standard rigging and skinning. Our system estimates neural blend shapes for input meshes with arbitrary connectivity, as well as weighting coefficients which are conditioned on the input joint rotations. Unlike recent deep learning techniques which supervise the network with ground-truth rigging and skinning parameters, our approach does not assume that the training data has a specific underlying deformation model. Instead, during training, the network observes deformed shapes and learns to infer the corresponding rig, skin and blend shapes using indirect supervision. During inference, we demonstrate that our network generalizes to unseen characters with arbitrary mesh connectivity, including unrigged characters built by 3D artists. Conforming to standard skeletal animation models enables direct plug-and-play in standard animation software, as well as game engines.

Pose-driven human image animation has achieved tremendous progress, enabling the generation of vivid and realistic human videos from just one single photo. However, it conversely exacerbates the risk of image misuse, as attackers may use one available image to create videos involving politics, violence and other illegal content. To counter this threat, we propose Dormant, a novel protection approach tailored to defend against pose-driven human image animation techniques. Dormant applies protective perturbation to one human image, preserving the visual similarity to the original but resulting in poor-quality video generation. The protective perturbation is optimized to induce misextraction of appearance features from the image and create incoherence among the generated video frames. Our extensive evaluation across 8 animation methods and 4 datasets demonstrates the superiority of Dormant over 6 baseline protection methods, leading to misaligned identities, visual distortions, noticeable artifacts, and inconsistent frames in the generated videos. Moreover, Dormant shows effectiveness on 6 real-world commercial services, even with fully black-box access.

We present AnimaX, a feed-forward 3D animation framework that bridges the motion priors of video diffusion models with the controllable structure of skeleton-based animation. Traditional motion synthesis methods are either restricted to fixed skeletal topologies or require costly optimization in high-dimensional deformation spaces. In contrast, AnimaX effectively transfers video-based motion knowledge to the 3D domain, supporting diverse articulated meshes with arbitrary skeletons. Our method represents 3D motion as multi-view, multi-frame 2D pose maps, and enables joint video-pose diffusion conditioned on template renderings and a textual motion prompt. We introduce shared positional encodings and modality-aware embeddings to ensure spatial-temporal alignment between video and pose sequences, effectively transferring video priors to motion generation task. The resulting multi-view pose sequences are triangulated into 3D joint positions and converted into mesh animation via inverse kinematics. Trained on a newly curated dataset of 160,000 rigged sequences, AnimaX achieves state-of-the-art results on VBench in generalization, motion fidelity, and efficiency, offering a scalable solution for category-agnostic 3D animation. Project page: https://anima-x.github.io/{https://anima-x.github.io/}.

Recent methods for arbitrary-skeleton motion capture from monocular video follow a factorized pipeline, where a Video-to-Pose network predicts joint positions and an analytical inverse-kinematics (IK) stage recovers joint rotations. While effective, this design is inherently limited, since joint positions do not fully determine rotations and leave degrees of freedom such as bone-axis twist ambiguous, and the non-differentiable IK stage prevents the system from adapting to noisy predictions or optimizing for the final animation objective. In this work, we present the first fully end-to-end framework in which both Video-to-Pose and Pose-to-Rotation are learnable and jointly optimized. We observe that the ambiguity in pose-to-rotation mapping arises from missing coordinate system information: the same joint positions can correspond to different rotations under different rest poses and local axis conventions. To resolve this, we introduce a reference pose-rotation pair from the target asset, which, together with the rest pose, not only anchors the mapping but also defines the underlying rotation coordinate system. This formulation turns rotation prediction into a well-constrained conditional problem and enables effective learning. In addition, our model predicts joint positions directly from video without relying on mesh intermediates, improving both robustness and efficiency. Both stages share a skeleton-aware Global-Local Graph-guided Multi-Head Attention (GL-GMHA) module for joint-level local reasoning and global coordination. Experiments on Truebones Zoo and Objaverse show that our method reduces rotation error from ~17 degrees to ~10 degrees, and to 6.54 degrees on unseen skeletons, while achieving ~20x faster inference than mesh-based pipelines. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/MoCapAnythingV2/

Portrait Animation aims to synthesize a lifelike video from a single source image, using it as an appearance reference, with motion (i.e., facial expressions and head pose) derived from a driving video, audio, text, or generation. Instead of following mainstream diffusion-based methods, we explore and extend the potential of the implicit-keypoint-based framework, which effectively balances computational efficiency and controllability. Building upon this, we develop a video-driven portrait animation framework named LivePortrait with a focus on better generalization, controllability, and efficiency for practical usage. To enhance the generation quality and generalization ability, we scale up the training data to about 69 million high-quality frames, adopt a mixed image-video training strategy, upgrade the network architecture, and design better motion transformation and optimization objectives. Additionally, we discover that compact implicit keypoints can effectively represent a kind of blendshapes and meticulously propose a stitching and two retargeting modules, which utilize a small MLP with negligible computational overhead, to enhance the controllability. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our framework even compared to diffusion-based methods. The generation speed remarkably reaches 12.8ms on an RTX 4090 GPU with PyTorch. The inference code and models are available at https://github.com/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait

3D scene reconstruction and 4D human animation have seen rapid progress and broad adoption in recent years. However, seamlessly integrating reconstructed scenes with 4D human animation to produce visually engaging results remains challenging. One key difficulty lies in placing the human at the correct location and scale within the scene while avoiding unrealistic interpenetration. Another challenge is that the human and the background may exhibit different lighting and style, leading to unrealistic composites. In addition, appealing character motion videos are often accompanied by camera movements, which means that the viewpoints need to be reconstructed along a specified trajectory. We present AnimateScene, which addresses the above issues in a unified framework. First, we design an accurate placement module that automatically determines a plausible 3D position for the human and prevents any interpenetration within the scene during motion. Second, we propose a training-free style alignment method that adapts the 4D human representation to match the background's lighting and style, achieving coherent visual integration. Finally, we design a joint post-reconstruction method for both the 4D human and the 3D scene that allows camera trajectories to be inserted, enabling the final rendered video to feature visually appealing camera movements. Extensive experiments show that AnimateScene generates dynamic scene videos with high geometric detail and spatiotemporal coherence across various camera and action combinations.

In this paper, we propose CharacterShot, a controllable and consistent 4D character animation framework that enables any individual designer to create dynamic 3D characters (i.e., 4D character animation) from a single reference character image and a 2D pose sequence. We begin by pretraining a powerful 2D character animation model based on a cutting-edge DiT-based image-to-video model, which allows for any 2D pose sequnce as controllable signal. We then lift the animation model from 2D to 3D through introducing dual-attention module together with camera prior to generate multi-view videos with spatial-temporal and spatial-view consistency. Finally, we employ a novel neighbor-constrained 4D gaussian splatting optimization on these multi-view videos, resulting in continuous and stable 4D character representations. Moreover, to improve character-centric performance, we construct a large-scale dataset Character4D, containing 13,115 unique characters with diverse appearances and motions, rendered from multiple viewpoints. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed benchmark, CharacterBench, demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jeoyal/CharacterShot.

Existing interpolation methods use pre-trained video diffusion priors to generate intermediate frames between sparsely sampled keyframes. In the absence of 3D geometric guidance, these methods struggle to produce plausible results for complex, articulated human motions and offer limited control over the synthesized dynamics. In this paper, we introduce PoseFuse3D Keyframe Interpolator (PoseFuse3D-KI), a novel framework that integrates 3D human guidance signals into the diffusion process for Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation (CHKI). To provide rich spatial and structural cues for interpolation, our PoseFuse3D, a 3D-informed control model, features a novel SMPL-X encoder that transforms 3D geometry and shape into the 2D latent conditioning space, alongside a fusion network that integrates these 3D cues with 2D pose embeddings. For evaluation, we build CHKI-Video, a new dataset annotated with both 2D poses and 3D SMPL-X parameters. We show that PoseFuse3D-KI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CHKI-Video, achieving a 9% improvement in PSNR and a 38% reduction in LPIPS. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate that our PoseFuse3D model improves interpolation fidelity.

Human animation from a single reference image shall be flexible to synthesize whole-body motion for either a headshot or whole-body portrait, where the motions are readily controlled by audio signal and text prompts. This is hard for most existing methods as they only support producing pre-specified head or half-body motion aligned with audio inputs. In this paper, we propose a versatile human animation method, i.e., VersaAnimator, which generates whole-body talking human from arbitrary portrait images, not only driven by audio signal but also flexibly controlled by text prompts. Specifically, we design a text-controlled, audio-driven motion generator that produces whole-body motion representations in 3D synchronized with audio inputs while following textual motion descriptions. To promote natural smooth motion, we propose a code-pose translation module to link VAE codebooks with 2D DWposes extracted from template videos. Moreover, we introduce a multi-modal video diffusion that generates photorealistic human animation from a reference image according to both audio inputs and whole-body motion representations. Extensive experiments show that VersaAnimator outperforms existing methods in visual quality, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

In this paper, we propose ARCH (Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans), a novel end-to-end framework for accurate reconstruction of animation-ready 3D clothed humans from a monocular image. Existing approaches to digitize 3D humans struggle to handle pose variations and recover details. Also, they do not produce models that are animation ready. In contrast, ARCH is a learned pose-aware model that produces detailed 3D rigged full-body human avatars from a single unconstrained RGB image. A Semantic Space and a Semantic Deformation Field are created using a parametric 3D body estimator. They allow the transformation of 2D/3D clothed humans into a canonical space, reducing ambiguities in geometry caused by pose variations and occlusions in training data. Detailed surface geometry and appearance are learned using an implicit function representation with spatial local features. Furthermore, we propose additional per-pixel supervision on the 3D reconstruction using opacity-aware differentiable rendering. Our experiments indicate that ARCH increases the fidelity of the reconstructed humans. We obtain more than 50% lower reconstruction errors for standard metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods on public datasets. We also show numerous qualitative examples of animated, high-quality reconstructed avatars unseen in the literature so far.

Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first animation system to combine real-time streaming with stable long-form generation at billion scale, built on a 14B-parameter video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). A two-stage training pipeline first adapts a pretrained bidirectional DiT into a block-causal autoregressive generator through Reference-Anchored Teacher-Forcing Adaptation, and then reduces the sampling budget to three steps through Block-wise Self-Forcing Distillation. To preserve appearance over extended streams, we introduce Pose-Retrieval Sink Attention (PR-Sink), a bounded KV-cache mechanism combining a Static Sink that permanently anchors the first generated block, a Dynamic Sink that holds a pose-retrieved historical block, and a three-slot Rolling Window. When a pose recurs, PR-Sink restores the relevant appearance context without retaining the entire sequence, so memory and per-block latency remain constant regardless of stream duration. Together with Ulysses sequence parallelism and operator fusion, these designs enable 19.63\,FPS streaming inference on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs. On a three-minute benchmark, LiveAnimate maintains nearly constant perceptual quality and identity from the first 30 seconds to the final minute, while prior systems degrade substantially or require hours of offline computation for the same rollout. These results establish a new operating point in quality, latency, and duration for interactive full-body animation.

Current audio-driven facial animation methods achieve impressive results for short videos but suffer from error accumulation and identity drift when extended to longer durations. Existing methods attempt to mitigate this through external spatial control, increasing long-term consistency but compromising the naturalness of motion. We propose KeyFace, a novel two-stage diffusion-based framework, to address these issues. In the first stage, keyframes are generated at a low frame rate, conditioned on audio input and an identity frame, to capture essential facial expressions and movements over extended periods of time. In the second stage, an interpolation model fills in the gaps between keyframes, ensuring smooth transitions and temporal coherence. To further enhance realism, we incorporate continuous emotion representations and handle a wide range of non-speech vocalizations (NSVs), such as laughter and sighs. We also introduce two new evaluation metrics for assessing lip synchronization and NSV generation. Experimental results show that KeyFace outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generating natural, coherent facial animations over extended durations, successfully encompassing NSVs and continuous emotions.

Preserving first-frame identity while ensuring precise motion control is a fundamental challenge in human image animation. The Image-to-Motion Binding process of the dominant Reference-to-Video (R2V) paradigm overlooks critical spatio-temporal misalignments common in real-world applications, leading to failures such as identity drift and visual artifacts. We introduce SteadyDancer, an Image-to-Video (I2V) paradigm-based framework that achieves harmonized and coherent animation and is the first to ensure first-frame preservation robustly. Firstly, we propose a Condition-Reconciliation Mechanism to harmonize the two conflicting conditions, enabling precise control without sacrificing fidelity. Secondly, we design Synergistic Pose Modulation Modules to generate an adaptive and coherent pose representation that is highly compatible with the reference image. Finally, we employ a Staged Decoupled-Objective Training Pipeline that hierarchically optimizes the model for motion fidelity, visual quality, and temporal coherence. Experiments demonstrate that SteadyDancer achieves state-of-the-art performance in both appearance fidelity and motion control, while requiring significantly fewer training resources than comparable methods.

We propose novel motion representations for animating articulated objects consisting of distinct parts. In a completely unsupervised manner, our method identifies object parts, tracks them in a driving video, and infers their motions by considering their principal axes. In contrast to the previous keypoint-based works, our method extracts meaningful and consistent regions, describing locations, shape, and pose. The regions correspond to semantically relevant and distinct object parts, that are more easily detected in frames of the driving video. To force decoupling of foreground from background, we model non-object related global motion with an additional affine transformation. To facilitate animation and prevent the leakage of the shape of the driving object, we disentangle shape and pose of objects in the region space. Our model can animate a variety of objects, surpassing previous methods by a large margin on existing benchmarks. We present a challenging new benchmark with high-resolution videos and show that the improvement is particularly pronounced when articulated objects are considered, reaching 96.6% user preference vs. the state of the art.

Performance analyses based on videos are commonly used by coaches of athletes in various sports disciplines. In individual sports, these analyses mainly comprise the body posture. This paper focuses on the disciplines of triple, high, and long jump, which require fine-grained locations of the athlete's body. Typical human pose estimation datasets provide only a very limited set of keypoints, which is not sufficient in this case. Therefore, we propose a method to detect arbitrary keypoints on the whole body of the athlete by leveraging the limited set of annotated keypoints and auto-generated segmentation masks of body parts. Evaluations show that our model is capable of detecting keypoints on the head, torso, hands, feet, arms, and legs, including also bent elbows and knees. We analyze and compare different techniques to encode desired keypoints as the model's input and their embedding for the Transformer backbone.

Training state-of-the-art models for human pose estimation in videos requires datasets with annotations that are really hard and expensive to obtain. Although transformers have been recently utilized for body pose sequence modeling, related methods rely on pseudo-ground truth to augment the currently limited training data available for learning such models. In this paper, we introduce PoseBERT, a transformer module that is fully trained on 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data via masked modeling. It is simple, generic and versatile, as it can be plugged on top of any image-based model to transform it in a video-based model leveraging temporal information. We showcase variants of PoseBERT with different inputs varying from 3D skeleton keypoints to rotations of a 3D parametric model for either the full body (SMPL) or just the hands (MANO). Since PoseBERT training is task agnostic, the model can be applied to several tasks such as pose refinement, future pose prediction or motion completion without finetuning. Our experimental results validate that adding PoseBERT on top of various state-of-the-art pose estimation methods consistently improves their performances, while its low computational cost allows us to use it in a real-time demo for smoothly animating a robotic hand via a webcam. Test code and models are available at https://github.com/naver/posebert.

Controllable character animation is an emerging task that generates character videos controlled by pose sequences from given character images. Although character consistency has made significant progress via reference UNet, another crucial factor, pose control, has not been well studied by existing methods yet, resulting in several issues: 1) The generation may fail when the input pose sequence is corrupted. 2) The hands generated using the DWPose sequence are blurry and unrealistic. 3) The generated video will be shaky if the pose sequence is not smooth enough. In this paper, we present RealisDance to handle all the above issues. RealisDance adaptively leverages three types of poses, avoiding failed generation caused by corrupted pose sequences. Among these pose types, HaMeR provides accurate 3D and depth information of hands, enabling RealisDance to generate realistic hands even for complex gestures. Besides using temporal attention in the main UNet, RealisDance also inserts temporal attention into the pose guidance network, smoothing the video from the pose condition aspect. Moreover, we introduce pose shuffle augmentation during training to further improve generation robustness and video smoothness. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of RealisDance over other existing methods, especially in hand quality.

Generating long, temporally coherent videos with precise control over subject identity and motion is a formidable challenge for current diffusion models, which often suffer from identity drift and are limited to short clips. We introduce PoseGen, a novel framework that generates arbitrarily long videos of a specific subject from a single reference image and a driving pose sequence. Our core innovation is an in-context LoRA finetuning strategy that injects subject appearance at the token level for identity preservation, while simultaneously conditioning on pose information at the channel level for fine-grained motion control. To overcome duration limits, PoseGen pioneers an interleaved segment generation method that seamlessly stitches video clips together, using a shared KV cache mechanism and a specialized transition process to ensure background consistency and temporal smoothness. Trained on a remarkably small 33-hour video dataset, extensive experiments show that PoseGen significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, pose accuracy, and its unique ability to produce coherent, artifact-free videos of unlimited duration.

Generating text-editable and pose-controllable character videos have an imperious demand in creating various digital human. Nevertheless, this task has been restricted by the absence of a comprehensive dataset featuring paired video-pose captions and the generative prior models for videos. In this work, we design a novel two-stage training scheme that can utilize easily obtained datasets (i.e.,image pose pair and pose-free video) and the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model to obtain the pose-controllable character videos. Specifically, in the first stage, only the keypoint-image pairs are used only for a controllable text-to-image generation. We learn a zero-initialized convolutional encoder to encode the pose information. In the second stage, we finetune the motion of the above network via a pose-free video dataset by adding the learnable temporal self-attention and reformed cross-frame self-attention blocks. Powered by our new designs, our method successfully generates continuously pose-controllable character videos while keeps the editing and concept composition ability of the pre-trained T2I model. The code and models will be made publicly available.

High-fidelity and expressive controllable human animation is essential for content creation and digital avatar applications. However, existing methods face a dilemma between expressiveness and disentanglement. Mainstream 2D pose-conditioned approaches suffer from "motion-shape entanglement", leading to the leakage of the driving subject's body shape. Conversely, methods relying on 3D priors (e.g., SMPL) achieve geometric disentanglement but struggle to capture facial expressions and complex gestures, resulting in rigid animations. To this end, we propose EMOSH, a novel framework for high-fidelity controllable human video generation. First, an Expressive Human Model (EHM) is introduced as the core control representation. By explicitly disentangling shape and pose parameters, we fundamentally resolve the body shape leakage issue. Alongside this, a robust motion tracker is designed to accurately estimate EHM parameters from video. Second, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Hybrid Motion Injection strategy, enabling more fine-grained control over expressions and gestures. Furthermore, we introduce a Spatially-Aligned Conditioning mechanism to bridge the domain gap between training and inference, improving identity consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMOSH outperforms previous methods in both self-driven and cross-driven scenarios, producing high-fidelity videos with vivid expressions while maintaining shape disentanglement.

Pose-driven human-image animation diffusion models have shown remarkable capabilities in realistic human video synthesis. Despite the promising results achieved by previous approaches, challenges persist in achieving temporally consistent animation and ensuring robustness with off-the-shelf pose detectors. In this paper, we present TCAN, a pose-driven human image animation method that is robust to erroneous poses and consistent over time. In contrast to previous methods, we utilize the pre-trained ControlNet without fine-tuning to leverage its extensive pre-acquired knowledge from numerous pose-image-caption pairs. To keep the ControlNet frozen, we adapt LoRA to the UNet layers, enabling the network to align the latent space between the pose and appearance features. Additionally, by introducing an additional temporal layer to the ControlNet, we enhance robustness against outliers of the pose detector. Through the analysis of attention maps over the temporal axis, we also designed a novel temperature map leveraging pose information, allowing for a more static background. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve promising results in video synthesis tasks encompassing various poses, like chibi. Project Page: https://eccv2024tcan.github.io/

Animation retargetting applies sparse motion description (e.g., keypoint sequences) to a character mesh to produce a semantically plausible and temporally coherent full-body mesh sequence. Existing approaches come with restrictions -- they require access to template-based shape priors or artist-designed deformation rigs, suffer from limited generalization to unseen motion and/or shapes, or exhibit motion jitter. We propose Self-supervised Motion Fields (SMF), a self-supervised framework that is trained with only sparse motion representations, without requiring dataset-specific annotations, templates, or rigs. At the heart of our method are Kinetic Codes, a novel autoencoder-based sparse motion encoding, that exposes a semantically rich latent space, simplifying large-scale training. Our architecture comprises dedicated spatial and temporal gradient predictors, which are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion. The combined network, regularized by the Kinetic Codes' latent space, has good generalization across both unseen shapes and new motions. We evaluated our method on unseen motion sampled from AMASS, D4D, Mixamo, and raw monocular video for animation transfer on various characters with varying shapes and topology. We report a new SoTA on the AMASS dataset in the context of generalization to unseen motion. Code, weights, and supplementary are available on the project webpage at https://motionfields.github.io/

Creating a realistic animatable avatar from a single static portrait remains challenging. Existing approaches often struggle to capture subtle facial expressions, the associated global body movements, and the dynamic background. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that leverages a pretrained video diffusion transformer model to generate high-fidelity, coherent talking portraits with controllable motion dynamics. At the core of our work is a dual-stage audio-visual alignment strategy. In the first stage, we employ a clip-level training scheme to establish coherent global motion by aligning audio-driven dynamics across the entire scene, including the reference portrait, contextual objects, and background. In the second stage, we refine lip movements at the frame level using a lip-tracing mask, ensuring precise synchronization with audio signals. To preserve identity without compromising motion flexibility, we replace the commonly used reference network with a facial-focused cross-attention module that effectively maintains facial consistency throughout the video. Furthermore, we integrate a motion intensity modulation module that explicitly controls expression and body motion intensity, enabling controllable manipulation of portrait movements beyond mere lip motion. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves higher quality with better realism, coherence, motion intensity, and identity preservation. Ours project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/fantasy-talking/.

We propose Framer for interactive frame interpolation, which targets producing smoothly transitioning frames between two images as per user creativity. Concretely, besides taking the start and end frames as inputs, our approach supports customizing the transition process by tailoring the trajectory of some selected keypoints. Such a design enjoys two clear benefits. First, incorporating human interaction mitigates the issue arising from numerous possibilities of transforming one image to another, and in turn enables finer control of local motions. Second, as the most basic form of interaction, keypoints help establish the correspondence across frames, enhancing the model to handle challenging cases (e.g., objects on the start and end frames are of different shapes and styles). It is noteworthy that our system also offers an "autopilot" mode, where we introduce a module to estimate the keypoints and refine the trajectory automatically, to simplify the usage in practice. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance of Framer on various applications, such as image morphing, time-lapse video generation, cartoon interpolation, etc. The code, the model, and the interface will be released to facilitate further research.

We propose X-NeMo, a novel zero-shot diffusion-based portrait animation pipeline that animates a static portrait using facial movements from a driving video of a different individual. Our work first identifies the root causes of the key issues in prior approaches, such as identity leakage and difficulty in capturing subtle and extreme expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce a fully end-to-end training framework that distills a 1D identity-agnostic latent motion descriptor from driving image, effectively controlling motion through cross-attention during image generation. Our implicit motion descriptor captures expressive facial motion in fine detail, learned end-to-end from a diverse video dataset without reliance on pretrained motion detectors. We further enhance expressiveness and disentangle motion latents from identity cues by supervising their learning with a dual GAN decoder, alongside spatial and color augmentations. By embedding the driving motion into a 1D latent vector and controlling motion via cross-attention rather than additive spatial guidance, our design eliminates the transmission of spatial-aligned structural clues from the driving condition to the diffusion backbone, substantially mitigating identity leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-NeMo surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, producing highly expressive animations with superior identity resemblance. Our code and models are available for research.

With the advance of text-to-image models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and corresponding personalization techniques such as DreamBooth and LoRA, everyone can manifest their imagination into high-quality images at an affordable cost. Subsequently, there is a great demand for image animation techniques to further combine generated static images with motion dynamics. In this report, we propose a practical framework to animate most of the existing personalized text-to-image models once and for all, saving efforts in model-specific tuning. At the core of the proposed framework is to insert a newly initialized motion modeling module into the frozen text-to-image model and train it on video clips to distill reasonable motion priors. Once trained, by simply injecting this motion modeling module, all personalized versions derived from the same base T2I readily become text-driven models that produce diverse and personalized animated images. We conduct our evaluation on several public representative personalized text-to-image models across anime pictures and realistic photographs, and demonstrate that our proposed framework helps these models generate temporally smooth animation clips while preserving the domain and diversity of their outputs. Code and pre-trained weights will be publicly available at https://animatediff.github.io/ .

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

Animation of 2D hand-drawn sketches provides an effective medium for visual communication. However, these sketches pose challenges, particularly in handling occlusions and accurately mapping motion. While 3D animation naturally addresses these challenges, estimating 3D motion remains a very complex task. Recent approaches to converting 2D sketches to 3D animations have mainly focused on specific types of motion, such as bipedal movements and facial expressions. We propose Sketch2Motion, a diffusion-guided framework for skeleton-based motion synthesis that combines classical character animation pipelines with deep generative priors. Our method represents motion using skeletal transformations, which are propagated to mesh deformations via linear blend skinning. To guide the resulting animation toward realistic and semantically meaningful motion, we integrate a text-to-video diffusion model via motion-aware score-distillation sampling (MoSDS), enabling optimization without paired motion data. Additionally, we apply physics-inspired smoothness, topological, and contact constraints to stabilize optimization and preserve motion plausibility. Further, we integrate a spring-mass simulator to introduce secondary motion effects. The proposed framework is generalized, fully differentiable, modular, and compatible with biped, quadruped, and non-living articulated characters. Experiments demonstrate that our approach produces temporally coherent, text-aligned animations that outperform baseline motion transfer methods that lack generative priors or explicit physical constraints. We will make our code and dataset publicly available.

Generating videos of complex human motions such as flips, cartwheels, and martial arts remains challenging for current video diffusion models. Text-only conditioning is temporally ambiguous for fine-grained motion control, while explicit pose-based controls, though effective, require users to provide complete skeleton sequences that are costly to produce for long and dynamic actions. We propose a two-stage cascaded framework that addresses both limitations. First, an autoregressive text-to-skeleton model generates 2D pose sequences from natural language descriptions by predicting each joint conditioned on previously generated poses. This design captures long-range temporal dependencies and inter-joint coordination required for complex motions. Second, a pose-conditioned video diffusion model synthesizes videos from a reference image and the generated skeleton sequence. It employs DINO-ALF (Adaptive Layer Fusion), a multi-level reference encoder that preserves appearance and clothing details under large pose changes and self-occlusions. To address the lack of publicly available datasets for complex human motion video generation, we introduce a Blender-based synthetic dataset containing 2,000 videos with diverse characters performing acrobatic and stunt-like motions. The dataset provides full control over appearance, motion, and environment. It fills an important gap because existing benchmarks significantly under-represent acrobatic motions while web-collected datasets raise copyright and privacy concerns. Experiments on our synthetic dataset and the Motion-X Fitness benchmark show that our text-to-skeleton model outperforms prior methods on FID, R-precision, and motion diversity. Our pose-to-video model also achieves the best results among all compared methods on VBench metrics for temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and subject preservation.

Character Animation aims to generating character videos from still images through driving signals. Currently, diffusion models have become the mainstream in visual generation research, owing to their robust generative capabilities. However, challenges persist in the realm of image-to-video, especially in character animation, where temporally maintaining consistency with detailed information from character remains a formidable problem. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character's movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames. By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Animating virtual avatars with free-view control is crucial for various applications like virtual reality and digital entertainment. Previous studies have attempted to utilize the representation power of the neural radiance field (NeRF) to reconstruct the human body from monocular videos. Recent works propose to graft a deformation network into the NeRF to further model the dynamics of the human neural field for animating vivid human motions. However, such pipelines either rely on pose-dependent representations or fall short of motion coherency due to frame-independent optimization, making it difficult to generalize to unseen pose sequences realistically. In this paper, we propose a novel framework MonoHuman, which robustly renders view-consistent and high-fidelity avatars under arbitrary novel poses. Our key insight is to model the deformation field with bi-directional constraints and explicitly leverage the off-the-peg keyframe information to reason the feature correlations for coherent results. Specifically, we first propose a Shared Bidirectional Deformation module, which creates a pose-independent generalizable deformation field by disentangling backward and forward deformation correspondences into shared skeletal motion weight and separate non-rigid motions. Then, we devise a Forward Correspondence Search module, which queries the correspondence feature of keyframes to guide the rendering network. The rendered results are thus multi-view consistent with high fidelity, even under challenging novel pose settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MonoHuman over state-of-the-art methods.

Generating controllable character animation from a reference image and motion guidance remains a challenging task due to the inherent difficulty of injecting appearance and motion cues into video diffusion models. Prior works often rely on complex architectures, explicit guider modules, or multi-stage processing pipelines, which increase structural overhead and hinder deployment. Inspired by the strong visual context modeling capacity of pre-trained video diffusion transformers, we propose FramePrompt, a minimalist yet powerful framework that treats reference images, skeleton-guided motion, and target video clips as a unified visual sequence. By reformulating animation as a conditional future prediction task, we bypass the need for guider networks and structural modifications. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms representative baselines across various evaluation metrics while also simplifying training. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of sequence-level visual conditioning and demonstrate the potential of pre-trained models for controllable animation without architectural changes.

Existing human motion generation methods with trajectory and pose inputs operate global processing on both modalities, leading to suboptimal outputs. In this paper, we propose IKMo, an image-keyframed motion generation method based on the diffusion model with trajectory and pose being decoupled. The trajectory and pose inputs go through a two-stage conditioning framework. In the first stage, the dedicated optimization module is applied to refine inputs. In the second stage, trajectory and pose are encoded via a Trajectory Encoder and a Pose Encoder in parallel. Then, motion with high spatial and semantic fidelity is guided by a motion ControlNet, which processes the fused trajectory and pose data. Experiment results based on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art on all metrics under trajectory-keyframe constraints. In addition, MLLM-based agents are implemented to pre-process model inputs. Given texts and keyframe images from users, the agents extract motion descriptions, keyframe poses, and trajectories as the optimized inputs into the motion generation model. We conducts a user study with 10 participants. The experiment results prove that the MLLM-based agents pre-processing makes generated motion more in line with users' expectation. We believe that the proposed method improves both the fidelity and controllability of motion generation by the diffusion model.

Video-guided 3D animation holds immense potential for content creation, offering intuitive and precise control over dynamic assets. However, practical deployment faces a critical yet frequently overlooked hurdle: the pose misalignment dilemma. In real-world scenarios, the initial pose of a user-provided static mesh rarely aligns with the starting frame of a reference video. Naively forcing a mesh to follow a mismatched trajectory inevitably leads to severe geometric distortion or animation failure. To address this, we present Rectified Dynamic Mesh (R-DMesh), a unified framework designed to generate high-fidelity 4D meshes that are ``rectified'' to align with video context. Unlike standard motion transfer approaches, our method introduces a novel VAE that explicitly disentangles the input into a conditional base mesh, relative motion trajectories, and a crucial rectification jump offset. This offset is learned to automatically transform the arbitrary pose of the input mesh to match the video's initial state before animation begins. We process these components via a Triflow Attention mechanism, which leverages vertex-wise geometric features to modulate the three orthogonal flows, ensuring physical consistency and local rigidity during the rectification and animation process. For generation, we employ a Rectified Flow-based Diffusion Transformer conditioned on pre-trained video latents, effectively transferring rich spatio-temporal priors to the 3D domain. To support this task, we construct Video-RDMesh, a large-scale dataset of over 500k dynamic mesh sequences specifically curated to simulate pose misalignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that R-DMesh not only solves the alignment problem but also enables robust downstream applications, including pose retargeting and holistic 4D generation.

This paper presents a simple method for "do as I do" motion transfer: given a source video of a person dancing, we can transfer that performance to a novel (amateur) target after only a few minutes of the target subject performing standard moves. We approach this problem as video-to-video translation using pose as an intermediate representation. To transfer the motion, we extract poses from the source subject and apply the learned pose-to-appearance mapping to generate the target subject. We predict two consecutive frames for temporally coherent video results and introduce a separate pipeline for realistic face synthesis. Although our method is quite simple, it produces surprisingly compelling results (see video). This motivates us to also provide a forensics tool for reliable synthetic content detection, which is able to distinguish videos synthesized by our system from real data. In addition, we release a first-of-its-kind open-source dataset of videos that can be legally used for training and motion transfer.

We introduce 4D Motion Scaffolds (MoSca), a neural information processing system designed to reconstruct and synthesize novel views of dynamic scenes from monocular videos captured casually in the wild. To address such a challenging and ill-posed inverse problem, we leverage prior knowledge from foundational vision models, lift the video data to a novel Motion Scaffold (MoSca) representation, which compactly and smoothly encodes the underlying motions / deformations. The scene geometry and appearance are then disentangled from the deformation field, and are encoded by globally fusing the Gaussians anchored onto the MoSca and optimized via Gaussian Splatting. Additionally, camera poses can be seamlessly initialized and refined during the dynamic rendering process, without the need for other pose estimation tools. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on dynamic rendering benchmarks.

Recent years have seen a tremendous improvement in the quality of video generation and editing approaches. While several techniques focus on editing appearance, few address motion. Current approaches using text, trajectories, or bounding boxes are limited to simple motions, so we specify motions with a single motion reference video instead. We further propose to use a pre-trained image-to-video model rather than a text-to-video model. This approach allows us to preserve the exact appearance and position of a target object or scene and helps disentangle appearance from motion. Our method, called motion-textual inversion, leverages our observation that image-to-video models extract appearance mainly from the (latent) image input, while the text/image embedding injected via cross-attention predominantly controls motion. We thus represent motion using text/image embedding tokens. By operating on an inflated motion-text embedding containing multiple text/image embedding tokens per frame, we achieve a high temporal motion granularity. Once optimized on the motion reference video, this embedding can be applied to various target images to generate videos with semantically similar motions. Our approach does not require spatial alignment between the motion reference video and target image, generalizes across various domains, and can be applied to various tasks such as full-body and face reenactment, as well as controlling the motion of inanimate objects and the camera. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the semantic video motion transfer task, significantly outperforming existing methods in this context.

Action customization involves generating videos where the subject performs actions dictated by input control signals. Current methods use pose-guided or global motion customization but are limited by strict constraints on spatial structure, such as layout, skeleton, and viewpoint consistency, reducing adaptability across diverse subjects and scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose FlexiAct, which transfers actions from a reference video to an arbitrary target image. Unlike existing methods, FlexiAct allows for variations in layout, viewpoint, and skeletal structure between the subject of the reference video and the target image, while maintaining identity consistency. Achieving this requires precise action control, spatial structure adaptation, and consistency preservation. To this end, we introduce RefAdapter, a lightweight image-conditioned adapter that excels in spatial adaptation and consistency preservation, surpassing existing methods in balancing appearance consistency and structural flexibility. Additionally, based on our observations, the denoising process exhibits varying levels of attention to motion (low frequency) and appearance details (high frequency) at different timesteps. So we propose FAE (Frequency-aware Action Extraction), which, unlike existing methods that rely on separate spatial-temporal architectures, directly achieves action extraction during the denoising process. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively transfers actions to subjects with diverse layouts, skeletons, and viewpoints. We release our code and model weights to support further research at https://shiyi-zh0408.github.io/projectpages/FlexiAct/

Hands play a central role in daily life, yet modeling natural hand motions remains underexplored. Existing methods that tackle text-to-hand-motion generation or hand animation captioning rely on studio-captured datasets with limited actions and contexts, making them costly to scale to "in-the-wild" settings. Further, contemporary models and their training schemes struggle to capture animation fidelity with text-motion alignment. To address this, we (1) introduce '3D Hands in the Wild' (3D-HIW), a dataset of 32K 3D hand-motion sequences and aligned text, and (2) propose CLUTCH, an LLM-based hand animation system with two critical innovations: (a) SHIFT, a novel VQ-VAE architecture to tokenize hand motion, and (b) a geometric refinement stage to finetune the LLM. To build 3D-HIW, we propose a data annotation pipeline that combines vision-language models (VLMs) and state-of-the-art 3D hand trackers, and apply it to a large corpus of egocentric action videos covering a wide range of scenarios. To fully capture motion in-the-wild, CLUTCH employs SHIFT, a part-modality decomposed VQ-VAE, which improves generalization and reconstruction fidelity. Finally, to improve animation quality, we introduce a geometric refinement stage, where CLUTCH is co-supervised with a reconstruction loss applied directly to decoded hand motion parameters. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion and motion-to-text tasks, establishing the first benchmark for scalable in-the-wild hand motion modelling. Code, data and models will be released.

Controllable character animation remains a challenging problem, particularly in handling rare poses, stylized characters, character-object interactions, complex illumination, and dynamic scenes. To tackle these issues, prior work has largely focused on injecting pose and appearance guidance via elaborate bypass networks, but often struggles to generalize to open-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new perspective that, as long as the foundation model is powerful enough, straightforward model modifications with flexible fine-tuning strategies can largely address the above challenges, taking a step towards controllable character animation in the wild. Specifically, we introduce RealisDance-DiT, built upon the Wan-2.1 video foundation model. Our sufficient analysis reveals that the widely adopted Reference Net design is suboptimal for large-scale DiT models. Instead, we demonstrate that minimal modifications to the foundation model architecture yield a surprisingly strong baseline. We further propose the low-noise warmup and "large batches and small iterations" strategies to accelerate model convergence during fine-tuning while maximally preserving the priors of the foundation model. In addition, we introduce a new test dataset that captures diverse real-world challenges, complementing existing benchmarks such as TikTok dataset and UBC fashion video dataset, to comprehensively evaluate the proposed method. Extensive experiments show that RealisDance-DiT outperforms existing methods by a large margin.

We target cross-domain face reenactment in this paper, i.e., driving a cartoon image with the video of a real person and vice versa. Recently, many works have focused on one-shot talking face generation to drive a portrait with a real video, i.e., within-domain reenactment. Straightforwardly applying those methods to cross-domain animation will cause inaccurate expression transfer, blur effects, and even apparent artifacts due to the domain shift between cartoon and real faces. Only a few works attempt to settle cross-domain face reenactment. The most related work AnimeCeleb requires constructing a dataset with pose vector and cartoon image pairs by animating 3D characters, which makes it inapplicable anymore if no paired data is available. In this paper, we propose a novel method for cross-domain reenactment without paired data. Specifically, we propose a transformer-based framework to align the motions from different domains into a common latent space where motion transfer is conducted via latent code addition. Two domain-specific motion encoders and two learnable motion base memories are used to capture domain properties. A source query transformer and a driving one are exploited to project domain-specific motion to the canonical space. The edited motion is projected back to the domain of the source with a transformer. Moreover, since no paired data is provided, we propose a novel cross-domain training scheme using data from two domains with the designed analogy constraint. Besides, we contribute a cartoon dataset in Disney style. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method over competing methods.

Recent advancements in personalized text-to-image (T2I) models have revolutionized content creation, empowering non-experts to generate stunning images with unique styles. While promising, adding realistic motions into these personalized images by text poses significant challenges in preserving distinct styles, high-fidelity details, and achieving motion controllability by text. In this paper, we present PIA, a Personalized Image Animator that excels in aligning with condition images, achieving motion controllability by text, and the compatibility with various personalized T2I models without specific tuning. To achieve these goals, PIA builds upon a base T2I model with well-trained temporal alignment layers, allowing for the seamless transformation of any personalized T2I model into an image animation model. A key component of PIA is the introduction of the condition module, which utilizes the condition frame and inter-frame affinity as input to transfer appearance information guided by the affinity hint for individual frame synthesis in the latent space. This design mitigates the challenges of appearance-related image alignment within and allows for a stronger focus on aligning with motion-related guidance.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved conditional video generation, particularly in the pose-guided human image animation task. Although existing methods are capable of generating high-fidelity and time-consistent animation sequences in regular motions and static scenes, there are still obvious limitations when facing complex human body motions (Hypermotion) that contain highly dynamic, non-standard motions, and the lack of a high-quality benchmark for evaluation of complex human motion animations. To address this challenge, we introduce the Open-HyperMotionX Dataset and HyperMotionX Bench, which provide high-quality human pose annotations and curated video clips for evaluating and improving pose-guided human image animation models under complex human motion conditions. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful DiT-based video generation baseline and design spatial low-frequency enhanced RoPE, a novel module that selectively enhances low-frequency spatial feature modeling by introducing learnable frequency scaling. Our method significantly improves structural stability and appearance consistency in highly dynamic human motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and proposed approach in advancing the generation quality of complex human motion image animations. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.

We present Follow-Your-Emoji, a diffusion-based framework for portrait animation, which animates a reference portrait with target landmark sequences. The main challenge of portrait animation is to preserve the identity of the reference portrait and transfer the target expression to this portrait while maintaining temporal consistency and fidelity. To address these challenges, Follow-Your-Emoji equipped the powerful Stable Diffusion model with two well-designed technologies. Specifically, we first adopt a new explicit motion signal, namely expression-aware landmark, to guide the animation process. We discover this landmark can not only ensure the accurate motion alignment between the reference portrait and target motion during inference but also increase the ability to portray exaggerated expressions (i.e., large pupil movements) and avoid identity leakage. Then, we propose a facial fine-grained loss to improve the model's ability of subtle expression perception and reference portrait appearance reconstruction by using both expression and facial masks. Accordingly, our method demonstrates significant performance in controlling the expression of freestyle portraits, including real humans, cartoons, sculptures, and even animals. By leveraging a simple and effective progressive generation strategy, we extend our model to stable long-term animation, thus increasing its potential application value. To address the lack of a benchmark for this field, we introduce EmojiBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse portrait images, driving videos, and landmarks. We show extensive evaluations on EmojiBench to verify the superiority of Follow-Your-Emoji.

The task of motion transfer between a source dancer and a target person is a special case of the pose transfer problem, in which the target person changes their pose in accordance with the motions of the dancer. In this work, we propose a novel method that can reanimate a single image by arbitrary video sequences, unseen during training. The method combines three networks: (i) a segmentation-mapping network, (ii) a realistic frame-rendering network, and (iii) a face refinement network. By separating this task into three stages, we are able to attain a novel sequence of realistic frames, capturing natural motion and appearance. Our method obtains significantly better visual quality than previous methods and is able to animate diverse body types and appearances, which are captured in challenging poses, as shown in the experiments and supplementary video.

Text-to-motion models excel at efficient human motion generation, but existing approaches lack fine-grained controllability over the generation process. Consequently, modifying subtle postures within a motion or inserting new actions at specific moments remains a challenge, limiting the applicability of these methods in diverse scenarios. In light of these challenges, we introduce CoMo, a Controllable Motion generation model, adept at accurately generating and editing motions by leveraging the knowledge priors of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, CoMo decomposes motions into discrete and semantically meaningful pose codes, with each code encapsulating the semantics of a body part, representing elementary information such as "left knee slightly bent". Given textual inputs, CoMo autoregressively generates sequences of pose codes, which are then decoded into 3D motions. Leveraging pose codes as interpretable representations, an LLM can directly intervene in motion editing by adjusting the pose codes according to editing instructions. Experiments demonstrate that CoMo achieves competitive performance in motion generation compared to state-of-the-art models while, in human studies, CoMo substantially surpasses previous work in motion editing abilities.

This paper studies the human image animation task, which aims to generate a video of a certain reference identity following a particular motion sequence. Existing animation works typically employ the frame-warping technique to animate the reference image towards the target motion. Despite achieving reasonable results, these approaches face challenges in maintaining temporal consistency throughout the animation due to the lack of temporal modeling and poor preservation of reference identity. In this work, we introduce MagicAnimate, a diffusion-based framework that aims at enhancing temporal consistency, preserving reference image faithfully, and improving animation fidelity. To achieve this, we first develop a video diffusion model to encode temporal information. Second, to maintain the appearance coherence across frames, we introduce a novel appearance encoder to retain the intricate details of the reference image. Leveraging these two innovations, we further employ a simple video fusion technique to encourage smooth transitions for long video animation. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline approaches on two benchmarks. Notably, our approach outperforms the strongest baseline by over 38% in terms of video fidelity on the challenging TikTok dancing dataset. Code and model will be made available.

We present 3D Cinemagraphy, a new technique that marries 2D image animation with 3D photography. Given a single still image as input, our goal is to generate a video that contains both visual content animation and camera motion. We empirically find that naively combining existing 2D image animation and 3D photography methods leads to obvious artifacts or inconsistent animation. Our key insight is that representing and animating the scene in 3D space offers a natural solution to this task. To this end, we first convert the input image into feature-based layered depth images using predicted depth values, followed by unprojecting them to a feature point cloud. To animate the scene, we perform motion estimation and lift the 2D motion into the 3D scene flow. Finally, to resolve the problem of hole emergence as points move forward, we propose to bidirectionally displace the point cloud as per the scene flow and synthesize novel views by separately projecting them into target image planes and blending the results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A user study is also conducted to validate the compelling rendering results of our method.

Character image animation remains a foundational yet challenging task in computer vision. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into three paradigms: methods based on explicit motion representations suffer from extraction errors and identity drift; methods based on implicit motion features lose fine-grained dynamics through compression; and in-context learning approaches avoid intermediate representations but incur prohibitive computational costs. Furthermore, all current systems are designed for offline synthesis, unable to meet the real-time requirements of interactive applications such as digital avatars and live-streaming hosts. To address these limitations, we present Wan-Animate-2, an end-to-end character animation framework that directly consumes the driving video within a redesigned Diffusion Transformer. Our architecture achieves superior motion fidelity and identity preservation by eliminating intermediate motion extractors entirely. We further introduce text driven viewpoint control that decouples the output camera perspective from the driving video--a capability rarely supported by prior character animation methods that rely on explicit motion representations. Beyond generation quality, we present Wan-Animate-2-Lite, an efficient variant that reduces inference latency to real-time thresholds through a three-stage training paradigm: teacher forcing pretraining with error buffer mechanism, and Self-Forcing distillation with chunk-wise backpropagation. This enables streaming character animation for interactive applications, opening new deployment scenarios that were previously infeasible. Qualitative evaluations and user studies demonstrate that Wan-Animate-2 achieves high-fidelity animation results across diverse characters and motion patterns. To foster further research and community development, we will release the Wan-Animate-2-Base model weights to the public.

This work explores the motion transfer from one video to another, which is crucial in animation for diverse characters. Previously, video motion transfer has been largely explored between human and human-like characters, enabling a lot of applications in digital creation. However, these approaches encounter a main limitation. Specifically, related technical pipelines heavily rely on a predefined human skeleton structure and accordingly require skeleton-conditional model training. On the one hand, these methods are difficult to generalize to diverse characters, such as animals from different species, while preserving their unique motion styles. On the other hand, labeled data in diverse skeletons is limited, which additionally restricts the large-scale training for the task. In this paper, we jump out of the skeleton-based motion transfer framework and propose a training-free motion transfer framework, named Motion4Motion. Motion4Motionmodels the motion flow of the character in a video instead of skeletons, which makes motion transfer across species easier. Extensive experimental results and novel applications show our methods outperform baselines impressively. Project page is available at https://lhchen.top/Motion4Motion.

Animating various character drawings is an engaging visual content creation task. Given a single character drawing, existing animation methods are limited to flat 2D motions and thus lack 3D effects. An alternative solution is to reconstruct a 3D model from a character drawing as a proxy and then retarget 3D motion data onto it. However, the existing image-to-3D methods could not work well for amateur character drawings in terms of appearance and geometry. We observe the contour lines, commonly existing in character drawings, would introduce significant ambiguity in texture synthesis due to their view-dependence. Additionally, thin regions represented by single-line contours are difficult to reconstruct (e.g., slim limbs of a stick figure) due to their delicate structures. To address these issues, we propose a novel system, DrawingSpinUp, to produce plausible 3D animations and breathe life into character drawings, allowing them to freely spin up, leap, and even perform a hip-hop dance. For appearance improvement, we adopt a removal-then-restoration strategy to first remove the view-dependent contour lines and then render them back after retargeting the reconstructed character. For geometry refinement, we develop a skeleton-based thinning deformation algorithm to refine the slim structures represented by the single-line contours. The experimental evaluations and a perceptual user study show that our proposed method outperforms the existing 2D and 3D animation methods and generates high-quality 3D animations from a single character drawing. Please refer to our project page (https://lordliang.github.io/DrawingSpinUp) for the code and generated animations.

Generating human motion with precise spatial control is a challenging problem. Existing approaches often require task-specific training or slow optimization, and enforcing hard constraints frequently disrupts motion naturalness. Building on the observation that many animation tasks can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, we introduce ProjFlow, a training-free sampler that achieves zero-shot, exact satisfaction of linear spatial constraints while preserving motion realism. Our key advance is a novel kinematics-aware metric that encodes skeletal topology. This metric allows the sampler to enforce hard constraints by distributing corrections coherently across the entire skeleton, avoiding the unnatural artifacts of naive projection. Furthermore, for sparse inputs, such as filling in long gaps between a few keyframes, we introduce a time-varying formulation using pseudo-observations that fade during sampling. Extensive experiments on representative applications, motion inpainting, and 2D-to-3D lifting, demonstrate that ProjFlow achieves exact constraint satisfaction and matches or improves realism over zero-shot baselines, while remaining competitive with training-based controllers.

This paper presents Motion Puzzle, a novel motion style transfer network that advances the state-of-the-art in several important respects. The Motion Puzzle is the first that can control the motion style of individual body parts, allowing for local style editing and significantly increasing the range of stylized motions. Designed to keep the human's kinematic structure, our framework extracts style features from multiple style motions for different body parts and transfers them locally to the target body parts. Another major advantage is that it can transfer both global and local traits of motion style by integrating the adaptive instance normalization and attention modules while keeping the skeleton topology. Thus, it can capture styles exhibited by dynamic movements, such as flapping and staggering, significantly better than previous work. In addition, our framework allows for arbitrary motion style transfer without datasets with style labeling or motion pairing, making many publicly available motion datasets available for training. Our framework can be easily integrated with motion generation frameworks to create many applications, such as real-time motion transfer. We demonstrate the advantages of our framework with a number of examples and comparisons with previous work.

Inverse kinematics (IK) is a core operation in animation, robotics, and biomechanics: given Cartesian constraints, recover joint rotations under a known kinematic tree. In many real-time human avatar pipelines, the available signal per frame is a sparse set of tracked 3D joint positions, whereas animation systems require joint orientations to drive skinning. Recovering full orientations from positions is underconstrained, most notably because twist about bone axes is ambiguous, and classical IK solvers typically rely on iterative optimization that can be slow and sensitive to noisy inputs. We introduce IK-GAT, a lightweight graph-attention network that reconstructs full-body joint orientations from 3D joint positions in a single forward pass. The model performs message passing over the skeletal parent-child graph to exploit kinematic structure during rotation inference. To simplify learning, IK-GAT predicts rotations in a bone-aligned world-frame representation anchored to rest-pose bone frames. This parameterization makes the twist axis explicit and is exactly invertible to standard parent-relative local rotations given the kinematic tree and rest pose. The network uses a continuous 6D rotation representation and is trained with a geodesic loss on SO(3) together with an optional forward-kinematics consistency regularizer. IK-GAT produces animation-ready local rotations that can directly drive a rigged avatar or be converted to pose parameters of SMPL-like body models for real-time and online applications. With 374K parameters and over 650 FPS on CPU, IK-GAT outperforms VPoser-based per-frame iterative optimization without warm-start at significantly lower cost, and is robust to initial pose and input noise

We introduce Wan-Animate, a unified framework for character animation and replacement. Given a character image and a reference video, Wan-Animate can animate the character by precisely replicating the expressions and movements of the character in the video to generate high-fidelity character videos. Alternatively, it can integrate the animated character into the reference video to replace the original character, replicating the scene's lighting and color tone to achieve seamless environmental integration. Wan-Animate is built upon the Wan model. To adapt it for character animation tasks, we employ a modified input paradigm to differentiate between reference conditions and regions for generation. This design unifies multiple tasks into a common symbolic representation. We use spatially-aligned skeleton signals to replicate body motion and implicit facial features extracted from source images to reenact expressions, enabling the generation of character videos with high controllability and expressiveness. Furthermore, to enhance environmental integration during character replacement, we develop an auxiliary Relighting LoRA. This module preserves the character's appearance consistency while applying the appropriate environmental lighting and color tone. Experimental results demonstrate that Wan-Animate achieves state-of-the-art performance. We are committed to open-sourcing the model weights and its source code.

Recent advances in latent diffusion-based generative models for portrait image animation, such as Hallo, have achieved impressive results in short-duration video synthesis. In this paper, we present updates to Hallo, introducing several design enhancements to extend its capabilities. First, we extend the method to produce long-duration videos. To address substantial challenges such as appearance drift and temporal artifacts, we investigate augmentation strategies within the image space of conditional motion frames. Specifically, we introduce a patch-drop technique augmented with Gaussian noise to enhance visual consistency and temporal coherence over long duration. Second, we achieve 4K resolution portrait video generation. To accomplish this, we implement vector quantization of latent codes and apply temporal alignment techniques to maintain coherence across the temporal dimension. By integrating a high-quality decoder, we realize visual synthesis at 4K resolution. Third, we incorporate adjustable semantic textual labels for portrait expressions as conditional inputs. This extends beyond traditional audio cues to improve controllability and increase the diversity of the generated content. To the best of our knowledge, Hallo2, proposed in this paper, is the first method to achieve 4K resolution and generate hour-long, audio-driven portrait image animations enhanced with textual prompts. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our method on publicly available datasets, including HDTF, CelebV, and our introduced "Wild" dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-duration portrait video animation, successfully generating rich and controllable content at 4K resolution for duration extending up to tens of minutes. Project page https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo2

Character animation aims to generate lifelike videos by transferring motion dynamics from a driving video to a reference image. Recent strides in generative models have paved the way for high-fidelity character animation. In this work, we present Kling-MotionControl, a unified DiT-based framework engineered specifically for robust, precise, and expressive holistic character animation. Leveraging a divide-and-conquer strategy within a cohesive system, the model orchestrates heterogeneous motion representations tailored to the distinct characteristics of body, face, and hands, effectively reconciling large-scale structural stability with fine-grained articulatory expressiveness. To ensure robust cross-identity generalization, we incorporate adaptive identity-agnostic learning, facilitating natural motion retargeting for diverse characters ranging from realistic humans to stylized cartoons. Simultaneously, we guarantee faithful appearance preservation through meticulous identity injection and fusion designs, further supported by a subject library mechanism that leverages comprehensive reference contexts. To ensure practical utility, we implement an advanced acceleration framework utilizing multi-stage distillation, boosting inference speed by over 10x. Kling-MotionControl distinguishes itself through intelligent semantic motion understanding and precise text responsiveness, allowing for flexible control beyond visual inputs. Human preference evaluations demonstrate that Kling-MotionControl delivers superior performance compared to leading commercial and open-source solutions, achieving exceptional fidelity in holistic motion control, open domain generalization, and visual quality and coherence. These results establish Kling-MotionControl as a robust solution for high-quality, controllable, and lifelike character animation.

We present X-Dancer, a novel zero-shot music-driven image animation pipeline that creates diverse and long-range lifelike human dance videos from a single static image. As its core, we introduce a unified transformer-diffusion framework, featuring an autoregressive transformer model that synthesize extended and music-synchronized token sequences for 2D body, head and hands poses, which then guide a diffusion model to produce coherent and realistic dance video frames. Unlike traditional methods that primarily generate human motion in 3D, X-Dancer addresses data limitations and enhances scalability by modeling a wide spectrum of 2D dance motions, capturing their nuanced alignment with musical beats through readily available monocular videos. To achieve this, we first build a spatially compositional token representation from 2D human pose labels associated with keypoint confidences, encoding both large articulated body movements (e.g., upper and lower body) and fine-grained motions (e.g., head and hands). We then design a music-to-motion transformer model that autoregressively generates music-aligned dance pose token sequences, incorporating global attention to both musical style and prior motion context. Finally we leverage a diffusion backbone to animate the reference image with these synthesized pose tokens through AdaIN, forming a fully differentiable end-to-end framework. Experimental results demonstrate that X-Dancer is able to produce both diverse and characterized dance videos, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art methods in term of diversity, expressiveness and realism. Code and model will be available for research purposes.

Motion in-betweening, a fundamental task in character animation, consists of generating motion sequences that plausibly interpolate user-provided keyframe constraints. It has long been recognized as a labor-intensive and challenging process. We investigate the potential of diffusion models in generating diverse human motions guided by keyframes. Unlike previous inbetweening methods, we propose a simple unified model capable of generating precise and diverse motions that conform to a flexible range of user-specified spatial constraints, as well as text conditioning. To this end, we propose Conditional Motion Diffusion In-betweening (CondMDI) which allows for arbitrary dense-or-sparse keyframe placement and partial keyframe constraints while generating high-quality motions that are diverse and coherent with the given keyframes. We evaluate the performance of CondMDI on the text-conditioned HumanML3D dataset and demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of diffusion models for keyframe in-betweening. We further explore the use of guidance and imputation-based approaches for inference-time keyframing and compare CondMDI against these methods.

We introduce a method for transferring the signer's appearance in sign language skeletal poses while preserving the sign content. Using estimated poses, we transfer the appearance of one signer to another, maintaining natural movements and transitions. This approach improves pose-based rendering and sign stitching while obfuscating identity. Our experiments show that while the method reduces signer identification accuracy, it slightly harms sign recognition performance, highlighting a tradeoff between privacy and utility. Our code is available at https://github.com/sign-language-processing/pose-anonymization.

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

Video generation has recently made striking visual progress, but maintaining coherent object motion and interactions remains difficult. We trace two practical bottlenecks: (i) human-provided motion hints (e.g., small 2D maps) often collapse to too few effective tokens after encoding, weakening guidance; and (ii) optimizing for appearance and motion in a single head can favor texture over temporal consistency. We present STANCE, an image-to-video framework that addresses both issues with two simple components. First, we introduce Instance Cues -- a pixel-aligned control signal that turns sparse, user-editable hints into a dense 2.5D (camera-relative) motion field by averaging per-instance flow and augmenting with monocular depth over the instance mask. This reduces depth ambiguity compared to 2D arrow inputs while remaining easy to use. Second, we preserve the salience of these cues in token space with Dense RoPE, which tags a small set of motion tokens (anchored on the first frame) with spatial-addressable rotary embeddings. Paired with joint RGB \(+\) auxiliary-map prediction (segmentation or depth), our model anchors structure while RGB handles appearance, stabilizing optimization and improving temporal coherence without requiring per-frame trajectory scripts.

We present I2V3D, a novel framework for animating static images into dynamic videos with precise 3D control, leveraging the strengths of both 3D geometry guidance and advanced generative models. Our approach combines the precision of a computer graphics pipeline, enabling accurate control over elements such as camera movement, object rotation, and character animation, with the visual fidelity of generative AI to produce high-quality videos from coarsely rendered inputs. To support animations with any initial start point and extended sequences, we adopt a two-stage generation process guided by 3D geometry: 1) 3D-Guided Keyframe Generation, where a customized image diffusion model refines rendered keyframes to ensure consistency and quality, and 2) 3D-Guided Video Interpolation, a training-free approach that generates smooth, high-quality video frames between keyframes using bidirectional guidance. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our framework in producing controllable, high-quality animations from single input images by harmonizing 3D geometry with generative models. The code for our framework will be publicly released.

This work studies the challenge of transfer animations between characters whose skeletal topologies differ substantially. While many techniques have advanced retargeting techniques in decades, transfer motions across diverse topologies remains less-explored. The primary obstacle lies in the inherent topological inconsistency between source and target skeletons, which restricts the establishment of straightforward one-to-one bone correspondences. Besides, the current lack of large-scale paired motion datasets spanning different topological structures severely constrains the development of data-driven approaches. To address these limitations, we introduce Motion2Motion, a novel, training-free framework. Simply yet effectively, Motion2Motion works with only one or a few example motions on the target skeleton, by accessing a sparse set of bone correspondences between the source and target skeletons. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that Motion2Motion achieves efficient and reliable performance in both similar-skeleton and cross-species skeleton transfer scenarios. The practical utility of our approach is further evidenced by its successful integration in downstream applications and user interfaces, highlighting its potential for industrial applications. Code and data are available at https://lhchen.top/Motion2Motion.

We introduce PICA, a novel representation for high-fidelity animatable clothed human avatars with physics-accurate dynamics, even for loose clothing. Previous neural rendering-based representations of animatable clothed humans typically employ a single model to represent both the clothing and the underlying body. While efficient, these approaches often fail to accurately represent complex garment dynamics, leading to incorrect deformations and noticeable rendering artifacts, especially for sliding or loose garments. Furthermore, previous works represent garment dynamics as pose-dependent deformations and facilitate novel pose animations in a data-driven manner. This often results in outcomes that do not faithfully represent the mechanics of motion and are prone to generating artifacts in out-of-distribution poses. To address these issues, we adopt two individual 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models with different deformation characteristics, modeling the human body and clothing separately. This distinction allows for better handling of their respective motion characteristics. With this representation, we integrate a graph neural network (GNN)-based clothed body physics simulation module to ensure an accurate representation of clothing dynamics. Our method, through its carefully designed features, achieves high-fidelity rendering of clothed human bodies in complex and novel driving poses, significantly outperforming previous methods under the same settings.

Existing methodologies for animating portrait images face significant challenges, particularly in handling non-frontal perspectives, rendering dynamic objects around the portrait, and generating immersive, realistic backgrounds. In this paper, we introduce the first application of a pretrained transformer-based video generative model that demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and generates highly dynamic, realistic videos for portrait animation, effectively addressing these challenges. The adoption of a new video backbone model makes previous U-Net-based methods for identity maintenance, audio conditioning, and video extrapolation inapplicable. To address this limitation, we design an identity reference network consisting of a causal 3D VAE combined with a stacked series of transformer layers, ensuring consistent facial identity across video sequences. Additionally, we investigate various speech audio conditioning and motion frame mechanisms to enable the generation of continuous video driven by speech audio. Our method is validated through experiments on benchmark and newly proposed wild datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods in generating realistic portraits characterized by diverse orientations within dynamic and immersive scenes. Further visualizations and the source code are available at: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo3/.

Recent progress in video diffusion models has markedly advanced character animation, which synthesizes motioned videos by animating a static identity image according to a driving video. Explicit methods represent motion using skeleton, DWPose or other explicit structured signals, but struggle to handle spatial mismatches and varying body scales. %proportions. Implicit methods, on the other hand, capture high-level implicit motion semantics directly from the driving video, but suffer from identity leakage and entanglement between motion and appearance. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel implicit motion representation that compresses per-frame motion into compact 1D motion tokens. This design relaxes strict spatial constraints inherent in 2D representations and effectively prevents identity information leakage from the motion video. Furthermore, we design a temporally consistent mask token-based retargeting module that enforces a temporal training bottleneck, mitigating interference from the source images' motion and improving retargeting consistency. Our methodology employs a three-stage training strategy to enhance the training efficiency and ensure high fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our implicit motion representation and the propose IM-Animation's generative capabilities are achieve superior or competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Recent motion generative models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing physically plausible character motion, but often overlook established animation principles used by professional animators to ground and design their animation work. Understanding and incorporating these principles into motion generative pipelines is essential for producing motions that serve not only physically grounded applications but also the needs of the character animation community. This enables the creation of characters that not only move in physically plausible ways but also feel alive, expressive, and engaging. To close this gap, we focus on the Exaggeration principle of animation and investigate how it can be incorporated into modern motion generative pipelines to produce more expressive character motions. To this end, we introduce a framework that operates at two stages of existing motion generative pipelines. The first stage introduces exaggeration during training, where we perform supervised fine-tuning of pre-trained text-to-motion models on our curated exaggeration dataset. The second stage operates at inference time, where we: (i) introduce a mathematical formulation of exaggeration based on dynamic movement primitives (DMPs); and (ii) leverage this formulation as an exaggeration guidance signal to guide existing diffusion and flow-matching text-to-motion generation models toward exaggerated motion without additional training. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations against three strong motion generation models, we show that our methods generate more exaggerated and expressive motions while preserving neutral reference motion intent and physical plausibility.

We propose X-Portrait, an innovative conditional diffusion model tailored for generating expressive and temporally coherent portrait animation. Specifically, given a single portrait as appearance reference, we aim to animate it with motion derived from a driving video, capturing both highly dynamic and subtle facial expressions along with wide-range head movements. As its core, we leverage the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model as the rendering backbone, while achieve fine-grained head pose and expression control with novel controlling signals within the framework of ControlNet. In contrast to conventional coarse explicit controls such as facial landmarks, our motion control module is learned to interpret the dynamics directly from the original driving RGB inputs. The motion accuracy is further enhanced with a patch-based local control module that effectively enhance the motion attention to small-scale nuances like eyeball positions. Notably, to mitigate the identity leakage from the driving signals, we train our motion control modules with scaling-augmented cross-identity images, ensuring maximized disentanglement from the appearance reference modules. Experimental results demonstrate the universal effectiveness of X-Portrait across a diverse range of facial portraits and expressive driving sequences, and showcase its proficiency in generating captivating portrait animations with consistently maintained identity characteristics.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is underexplored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language. In this paper, we present Keyframer, a design tool for animating static images (SVGs) with natural language. Informed by interviews with professional animation designers and engineers, Keyframer supports exploration and refinement of animations through the combination of prompting and direct editing of generated output. The system also enables users to request design variants, supporting comparison and ideation. Through a user study with 13 participants, we contribute a characterization of user prompting strategies, including a taxonomy of semantic prompt types for describing motion and a 'decomposed' prompting style where users continually adapt their goals in response to generated output.We share how direct editing along with prompting enables iteration beyond one-shot prompting interfaces common in generative tools today. Through this work, we propose how LLMs might empower a range of audiences to engage with animation creation.

Human image animation has gained increasing attention and developed rapidly due to its broad applications in digital humans. However, existing methods rely largely on 2D-rendered pose images for motion guidance, which limits generalization and discards essential 3D information for open-world animation. To tackle this problem, we propose MTVCrafter (Motion Tokenization Video Crafter), the first framework that directly models raw 3D motion sequences (i.e., 4D motion) for human image animation. Specifically, we introduce 4DMoT (4D motion tokenizer) to quantize 3D motion sequences into 4D motion tokens. Compared to 2D-rendered pose images, 4D motion tokens offer more robust spatio-temporal cues and avoid strict pixel-level alignment between pose image and character, enabling more flexible and disentangled control. Then, we introduce MV-DiT (Motion-aware Video DiT). By designing unique motion attention with 4D positional encodings, MV-DiT can effectively leverage motion tokens as 4D compact yet expressive context for human image animation in the complex 3D world. Hence, it marks a significant step forward in this field and opens a new direction for pose-guided human video generation. Experiments show that our MTVCrafter achieves state-of-the-art results with an FID-VID of 6.98, surpassing the second-best by 65%. Powered by robust motion tokens, MTVCrafter also generalizes well to diverse open-world characters (single/multiple, full/half-body) across various styles and scenarios. Our video demos and code are on: https://github.com/DINGYANB/MTVCrafter.

Motion in-betweening is one of the most artistically demanding and time consuming stages of 3D animation, where the expressivity and rhythm of motion are defined. The level of creative control it requires makes it a major production bottleneck, underscoring the need for intelligent tools that assist animators in this process. Although recent deep learning approaches have achieved strong results in motion synthesis and in-betweening, they assume data characteristics, motion styles, and problem formulations that diverge from professional animation workflows. To bridge this gap, we propose a method explicitly aligned with the constraints of motion in-betweening for keyframe-based animation in production environments. At its core, the Adaptive Interpolation-Synthesis (AIS) layer mirrors the animator's creative process by dynamically balancing learned interpolation and direct pose synthesis. In addition, a domain-based input keypose schedule reflects the distribution of production data, improving stylistic consistency and alignment between training and real-world usage. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on production data; when integrated into Autodesk Maya, it enables animators to complete in-betweening tasks with a 3.5x speedup.

This work introduces a novel strategy for generating synthetic training data for 2D and 3D pose estimation of animals using keyframe animations. With the objective to automate the process of creating animations for wildlife, we train several 2D and 3D pose estimation models with synthetic data, and put in place an end-to-end pipeline called ZooBuilder. The pipeline takes as input a video of an animal in the wild, and generates the corresponding 2D and 3D coordinates for each joint of the animal's skeleton. With this approach, we produce motion capture data that can be used to create animations for wildlife.

Natural language plays a critical role in many computer vision applications, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval, to provide fine-grained semantic information. Unfortunately, while human pose is key to human understanding, current 3D human pose datasets lack detailed language descriptions. To address this issue, we have introduced the PoseScript dataset. This dataset pairs more than six thousand 3D human poses from AMASS with rich human-annotated descriptions of the body parts and their spatial relationships. Additionally, to increase the size of the dataset to a scale that is compatible with data-hungry learning algorithms, we have proposed an elaborate captioning process that generates automatic synthetic descriptions in natural language from given 3D keypoints. This process extracts low-level pose information, known as "posecodes", using a set of simple but generic rules on the 3D keypoints. These posecodes are then combined into higher level textual descriptions using syntactic rules. With automatic annotations, the amount of available data significantly scales up (100k), making it possible to effectively pretrain deep models for finetuning on human captions. To showcase the potential of annotated poses, we present three multi-modal learning tasks that utilize the PoseScript dataset. Firstly, we develop a pipeline that maps 3D poses and textual descriptions into a joint embedding space, allowing for cross-modal retrieval of relevant poses from large-scale datasets. Secondly, we establish a baseline for a text-conditioned model generating 3D poses. Thirdly, we present a learned process for generating pose descriptions. These applications demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of annotated poses in various tasks and pave the way for future research in the field.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for music-driven dance motion synthesis with controllable key pose constraint. In contrast to methods that generate dance motion sequences only based on music without any other controllable conditions, this work targets on synthesizing high-quality dance motion driven by music as well as customized poses performed by users. Our model involves two single-modal transformer encoders for music and motion representations and a cross-modal transformer decoder for dance motions generation. The cross-modal transformer decoder achieves the capability of synthesizing smooth dance motion sequences, which keeps a consistency with key poses at corresponding positions, by introducing the local neighbor position embedding. Such mechanism makes the decoder more sensitive to key poses and the corresponding positions. Our dance synthesis model achieves satisfactory performance both on quantitative and qualitative evaluations with extensive experiments, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Close-proximity human-human interactive poses convey rich contextual information about interaction dynamics. Given such poses, humans can intuitively infer the context and anticipate possible past and future dynamics, drawing on strong priors of human behavior. Inspired by this observation, we propose Ponimator, a simple framework anchored on proximal interactive poses for versatile interaction animation. Our training data consists of close-contact two-person poses and their surrounding temporal context from motion-capture interaction datasets. Leveraging interactive pose priors, Ponimator employs two conditional diffusion models: (1) a pose animator that uses the temporal prior to generate dynamic motion sequences from interactive poses, and (2) a pose generator that applies the spatial prior to synthesize interactive poses from a single pose, text, or both when interactive poses are unavailable. Collectively, Ponimator supports diverse tasks, including image-based interaction animation, reaction animation, and text-to-interaction synthesis, facilitating the transfer of interaction knowledge from high-quality mocap data to open-world scenarios. Empirical experiments across diverse datasets and applications demonstrate the universality of the pose prior and the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.

We introduce Dream, Lift, Animate (DLA), a novel framework that reconstructs animatable 3D human avatars from a single image. This is achieved by leveraging multi-view generation, 3D Gaussian lifting, and pose-aware UV-space mapping of 3D Gaussians. Given an image, we first dream plausible multi-views using a video diffusion model, capturing rich geometric and appearance details. These views are then lifted into unstructured 3D Gaussians. To enable animation, we propose a transformer-based encoder that models global spatial relationships and projects these Gaussians into a structured latent representation aligned with the UV space of a parametric body model. This latent code is decoded into UV-space Gaussians that can be animated via body-driven deformation and rendered conditioned on pose and viewpoint. By anchoring Gaussians to the UV manifold, our method ensures consistency during animation while preserving fine visual details. DLA enables real-time rendering and intuitive editing without requiring post-processing. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on ActorsHQ and 4D-Dress datasets in both perceptual quality and photometric accuracy. By combining the generative strengths of video diffusion models with a pose-aware UV-space Gaussian mapping, DLA bridges the gap between unstructured 3D representations and high-fidelity, animation-ready avatars.

This report presents UniAnimate-DiT, an advanced project that leverages the cutting-edge and powerful capabilities of the open-source Wan2.1 model for consistent human image animation. Specifically, to preserve the robust generative capabilities of the original Wan2.1 model, we implement Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) technique to fine-tune a minimal set of parameters, significantly reducing training memory overhead. A lightweight pose encoder consisting of multiple stacked 3D convolutional layers is designed to encode motion information of driving poses. Furthermore, we adopt a simple concatenation operation to integrate the reference appearance into the model and incorporate the pose information of the reference image for enhanced pose alignment. Experimental results show that our approach achieves visually appearing and temporally consistent high-fidelity animations. Trained on 480p (832x480) videos, UniAnimate-DiT demonstrates strong generalization capabilities to seamlessly upscale to 720P (1280x720) during inference. The training and inference code is publicly available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/UniAnimate-DiT.

Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently, application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works. Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation.

Generating animatable human avatars from a single image is essential for various digital human modeling applications. Existing 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to capture fine details in animatable models, while generative approaches for controllable animation, though avoiding explicit 3D modeling, suffer from viewpoint inconsistencies in extreme poses and computational inefficiencies. In this paper, we address these challenges by leveraging the power of generative models to produce detailed multi-view canonical pose images, which help resolve ambiguities in animatable human reconstruction. We then propose a robust method for 3D reconstruction of inconsistent images, enabling real-time rendering during inference. Specifically, we adapt a transformer-based video generation model to generate multi-view canonical pose images and normal maps, pretraining on a large-scale video dataset to improve generalization. To handle view inconsistencies, we recast the reconstruction problem as a 4D task and introduce an efficient 3D modeling approach using 4D Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves photorealistic, real-time animation of 3D human avatars from in-the-wild images, showcasing its effectiveness and generalization capability.

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

We introduce a novel text-to-pose video editing method, ReimaginedAct. While existing video editing tasks are limited to changes in attributes, backgrounds, and styles, our method aims to predict open-ended human action changes in video. Moreover, our method can accept not only direct instructional text prompts but also `what if' questions to predict possible action changes. ReimaginedAct comprises video understanding, reasoning, and editing modules. First, an LLM is utilized initially to obtain a plausible answer for the instruction or question, which is then used for (1) prompting Grounded-SAM to produce bounding boxes of relevant individuals and (2) retrieving a set of pose videos that we have collected for editing human actions. The retrieved pose videos and the detected individuals are then utilized to alter the poses extracted from the original video. We also employ a timestep blending module to ensure the edited video retains its original content except where necessary modifications are needed. To facilitate research in text-to-pose video editing, we introduce a new evaluation dataset, WhatifVideo-1.0. This dataset includes videos of different scenarios spanning a range of difficulty levels, along with questions and text prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that existing video editing methods struggle with human action editing, while our approach can achieve effective action editing and even imaginary editing from counterfactual questions.

With the recent advancements in single-image-based human mesh recovery, there is a growing interest in enhancing its performance in certain extreme scenarios, such as occlusion, while maintaining overall model accuracy. Although obtaining accurately annotated 3D human poses under occlusion is challenging, there is still a wealth of rich and precise 2D pose annotations that can be leveraged. However, existing works mostly focus on directly leveraging 2D pose coordinates to estimate 3D pose and mesh. In this paper, we present PostoMETRO(Pose token enhanced MEsh TRansfOrmer), which integrates occlusion-resilient 2D pose representation into transformers in a token-wise manner. Utilizing a specialized pose tokenizer, we efficiently condense 2D pose data to a compact sequence of pose tokens and feed them to the transformer together with the image tokens. This process not only ensures a rich depiction of texture from the image but also fosters a robust integration of pose and image information. Subsequently, these combined tokens are queried by vertex and joint tokens to decode 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints. Facilitated by the robust pose token representation and the effective combination, we are able to produce more precise 3D coordinates, even under extreme scenarios like occlusion. Experiments on both standard and occlusion-specific benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PostoMETRO. Qualitative results further illustrate the clarity of how 2D pose can help 3D reconstruction. Code will be made available.

Real-time portrait animation is essential for interactive applications such as virtual assistants and live avatars, requiring high visual fidelity, temporal coherence, ultra-low latency, and responsive control from dynamic inputs like reference images and driving signals. While diffusion-based models achieve strong quality, their non-causal nature hinders streaming deployment. Causal autoregressive video generation approaches enable efficient frame-by-frame generation but suffer from error accumulation, motion discontinuities at chunk boundaries, and degraded long-term consistency. In this work, we present a novel streaming framework named Knot Forcing for real-time portrait animation that addresses these challenges through three key designs: (1) a chunk-wise generation strategy with global identity preservation via cached KV states of the reference image and local temporal modeling using sliding window attention; (2) a temporal knot module that overlaps adjacent chunks and propagates spatio-temporal cues via image-to-video conditioning to smooth inter-chunk motion transitions; and (3) A "running ahead" mechanism that dynamically updates the reference frame's temporal coordinate during inference, keeping its semantic context ahead of the current rollout frame to support long-term coherence. Knot Forcing enables high-fidelity, temporally consistent, and interactive portrait animation over infinite sequences, achieving real-time performance with strong visual stability on consumer-grade GPUs.

Recent work on human animation usually involves audio, pose, or movement maps conditions, thereby achieves vivid animation quality. However, these methods often face practical challenges due to extra control conditions, cumbersome condition injection modules, or limitation to head region driving. Hence, we ask if it is possible to achieve striking half-body human animation while simplifying unnecessary conditions. To this end, we propose a half-body human animation method, dubbed EchoMimicV2, that leverages a novel Audio-Pose Dynamic Harmonization strategy, including Pose Sampling and Audio Diffusion, to enhance half-body details, facial and gestural expressiveness, and meanwhile reduce conditions redundancy. To compensate for the scarcity of half-body data, we utilize Head Partial Attention to seamlessly accommodate headshot data into our training framework, which can be omitted during inference, providing a free lunch for animation. Furthermore, we design the Phase-specific Denoising Loss to guide motion, detail, and low-level quality for animation in specific phases, respectively. Besides, we also present a novel benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of half-body human animation. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that EchoMimicV2 surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Relightable portrait animation aims to animate a static reference portrait to match the head movements and expressions of a driving video while adapting to user-specified or reference lighting conditions. Existing portrait animation methods fail to achieve relightable portraits because they do not separate and manipulate intrinsic (identity and appearance) and extrinsic (pose and lighting) features. In this paper, we present a Lighting Controllable Video Diffusion model (LCVD) for high-fidelity, relightable portrait animation. We address this limitation by distinguishing these feature types through dedicated subspaces within the feature space of a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model. Specifically, we employ the 3D mesh, pose, and lighting-rendered shading hints of the portrait to represent the extrinsic attributes, while the reference represents the intrinsic attributes. In the training phase, we employ a reference adapter to map the reference into the intrinsic feature subspace and a shading adapter to map the shading hints into the extrinsic feature subspace. By merging features from these subspaces, the model achieves nuanced control over lighting, pose, and expression in generated animations. Extensive evaluations show that LCVD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in lighting realism, image quality, and video consistency, setting a new benchmark in relightable portrait animation.

Animating a still image offers an engaging visual experience. Traditional image animation techniques mainly focus on animating natural scenes with stochastic dynamics (e.g. clouds and fluid) or domain-specific motions (e.g. human hair or body motions), and thus limits their applicability to more general visual content. To overcome this limitation, we explore the synthesis of dynamic content for open-domain images, converting them into animated videos. The key idea is to utilize the motion prior of text-to-video diffusion models by incorporating the image into the generative process as guidance. Given an image, we first project it into a text-aligned rich context representation space using a query transformer, which facilitates the video model to digest the image content in a compatible fashion. However, some visual details still struggle to be preserved in the resultant videos. To supplement with more precise image information, we further feed the full image to the diffusion model by concatenating it with the initial noises. Experimental results show that our proposed method can produce visually convincing and more logical & natural motions, as well as higher conformity to the input image. Comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors.

Conditional human animation transforms a static reference image into a dynamic sequence by applying motion cues such as poses. These motion cues are typically derived from video data but are susceptible to limitations including low temporal resolution, motion blur, overexposure, and inaccuracies under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras provide data streams with exceptionally high temporal resolution, a wide dynamic range, and inherent resistance to motion blur and exposure issues. In this work, we propose EvAnimate, a framework that leverages event streams as motion cues to animate static human images. Our approach employs a specialized event representation that transforms asynchronous event streams into 3-channel slices with controllable slicing rates and appropriate slice density, ensuring compatibility with diffusion models. Subsequently, a dual-branch architecture generates high-quality videos by harnessing the inherent motion dynamics of the event streams, thereby enhancing both video quality and temporal consistency. Specialized data augmentation strategies further enhance cross-person generalization. Finally, we establish a new benchmarking, including simulated event data for training and validation, and a real-world event dataset capturing human actions under normal and extreme scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate that EvAnimate achieves high temporal fidelity and robust performance in scenarios where traditional video-derived cues fall short.

Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/projects/jca/.

Motion capture now underpins content creation far beyond digital humans, yet most existing pipelines remain species- or template-specific. We formalize this gap as Category-Agnostic Motion Capture (CAMoCap): given a monocular video and an arbitrary rigged 3D asset as a prompt, the goal is to reconstruct a rotation-based animation such as BVH that directly drives the specific asset. We present MoCapAnything, a reference-guided, factorized framework that first predicts 3D joint trajectories and then recovers asset-specific rotations via constraint-aware inverse kinematics. The system contains three learnable modules and a lightweight IK stage: (1) a Reference Prompt Encoder that extracts per-joint queries from the asset's skeleton, mesh, and rendered images; (2) a Video Feature Extractor that computes dense visual descriptors and reconstructs a coarse 4D deforming mesh to bridge the gap between video and joint space; and (3) a Unified Motion Decoder that fuses these cues to produce temporally coherent trajectories. We also curate Truebones Zoo with 1038 motion clips, each providing a standardized skeleton-mesh-render triad. Experiments on both in-domain benchmarks and in-the-wild videos show that MoCapAnything delivers high-quality skeletal animations and exhibits meaningful cross-species retargeting across heterogeneous rigs, enabling scalable, prompt-driven 3D motion capture for arbitrary assets. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/MoCapAnything/

We present a method to build animatable dog avatars from monocular videos. This is challenging as animals display a range of (unpredictable) non-rigid movements and have a variety of appearance details (e.g., fur, spots, tails). We develop an approach that links the video frames via a 4D solution that jointly solves for animal's pose variation, and its appearance (in a canonical pose). To this end, we significantly improve the quality of template-based shape fitting by endowing the SMAL parametric model with Continuous Surface Embeddings, which brings image-to-mesh reprojection constaints that are denser, and thus stronger, than the previously used sparse semantic keypoint correspondences. To model appearance, we propose an implicit duplex-mesh texture that is defined in the canonical pose, but can be deformed using SMAL pose coefficients and later rendered to enforce a photometric compatibility with the input video frames. On the challenging CoP3D and APTv2 datasets, we demonstrate superior results (both in terms of pose estimates and predicted appearance) to existing template-free (RAC) and template-based approaches (BARC, BITE).

Traditional cartoon and anime production involves keyframing, inbetweening, and colorization stages, which require intensive manual effort. Despite recent advances in AI, existing methods often handle these stages separately, leading to error accumulation and artifacts. For instance, inbetweening approaches struggle with large motions, while colorization methods require dense per-frame sketches. To address this, we introduce ToonComposer, a generative model that unifies inbetweening and colorization into a single post-keyframing stage. ToonComposer employs a sparse sketch injection mechanism to provide precise control using keyframe sketches. Additionally, it uses a cartoon adaptation method with the spatial low-rank adapter to tailor a modern video foundation model to the cartoon domain while keeping its temporal prior intact. Requiring as few as a single sketch and a colored reference frame, ToonComposer excels with sparse inputs, while also supporting multiple sketches at any temporal location for more precise motion control. This dual capability reduces manual workload and improves flexibility, empowering artists in real-world scenarios. To evaluate our model, we further created PKBench, a benchmark featuring human-drawn sketches that simulate real-world use cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that ToonComposer outperforms existing methods in visual quality, motion consistency, and production efficiency, offering a superior and more flexible solution for AI-assisted cartoon production.

Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.

The production of 2D animation follows an industry-standard workflow, encompassing four essential stages: character design, keyframe animation, in-betweening, and coloring. Our research focuses on reducing the labor costs in the above process by harnessing the potential of increasingly powerful generative AI. Using video diffusion models as the foundation, AniDoc emerges as a video line art colorization tool, which automatically converts sketch sequences into colored animations following the reference character specification. Our model exploits correspondence matching as an explicit guidance, yielding strong robustness to the variations (e.g., posture) between the reference character and each line art frame. In addition, our model could even automate the in-betweening process, such that users can easily create a temporally consistent animation by simply providing a character image as well as the start and end sketches. Our code is available at: https://yihao-meng.github.io/AniDoc_demo.

We propose a new problem, In-2-4D, for generative 4D (i.e., 3D + motion) inbetweening from a minimalistic input setting: two single-view images capturing an object in two distinct motion states. Given two images representing the start and end states of an object in motion, our goal is to generate and reconstruct the motion in 4D. We utilize a video interpolation model to predict the motion, but large frame-to-frame motions can lead to ambiguous interpretations. To overcome this, we employ a hierarchical approach to identify keyframes that are visually close to the input states and show significant motion, then generate smooth fragments between them. For each fragment, we construct the 3D representation of the keyframe using Gaussian Splatting. The temporal frames within the fragment guide the motion, enabling their transformation into dynamic Gaussians through a deformation field. To improve temporal consistency and refine 3D motion, we expand the self-attention of multi-view diffusion across timesteps and apply rigid transformation regularization. Finally, we merge the independently generated 3D motion segments by interpolating boundary deformation fields and optimizing them to align with the guiding video, ensuring smooth and flicker-free transitions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitiave experiments as well as a user study, we show the effectiveness of our method and its components. The project page is available at https://in-2-4d.github.io/