# Photo Wake-Up: 3D Character Animation from a Single Photo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.02246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02246/

## Key facts

- Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18964/) (2024)
- [DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06025/) (2023)
- [DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00040/) (2023)
- [Generative Image Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07906/) (2023)
- [MOFA-Video: Controllable Image Animation via Generative Motion Field Adaptions in Frozen Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20222/) (2024)
- [AnimateAnything: Fine-Grained Open Domain Image Animation with Motion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12886/) (2023)
- [PhysGen3D: Crafting a Miniature Interactive World from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20746/) (2025)
- [Drivable Volumetric Avatars using Texel-Aligned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09774/) (2022)
- [S3: Neural Shape, Skeleton, and Skinning Fields for 3D Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06571/) (2021)
- [AvatarCLIP: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Generation and Animation of 3D Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08535/) (2022)
- [Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08268/) (2024)
- [Breathing Life Into Sketches Using Text-to-Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13608/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12141/) (2021)
- [Faster VoxelPose: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation by Orthographic Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10955/) (2022)
- [High-Fidelity Clothed Avatar Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03903/) (2023)
- [Animatable Implicit Neural Representations for Creating Realistic Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08133/) (2022)
- [StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04925/) (2024)
- [Topologically-Aware Deformation Fields for Single-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06267/) (2022)
- [D-IF: Uncertainty-aware Human Digitization via Implicit Distribution Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08857/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Domain Human Mesh Reconstruction via Dynamic Bilevel Online Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04017/) (2021)
- [DIPO: Dual-State Images Controlled Articulated Object Generation Powered by Diverse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20460/) (2025)
- [A Method for Animating Children's Drawings of the Human Figure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12741/) (2023)
- [Vision-Based Human Pose Estimation via Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13872/) (2023)
- [Audio-driven Neural Gesture Reenactment with Video Motion Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11524/) (2022)
- [HUMBI: A Large Multiview Dataset of Human Body Expressions and Benchmark Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00119/) (2021)
- [Action2video: Generating Videos of Human 3D Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06925/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a method and application for animating a human subject from a single photo. E.g., the character can walk out, run, sit, or jump in 3D. The key contributions of this paper are: 1) an application of viewing and animating humans in single photos in 3D, 2) a novel 2D warping method to deform a posable template body model to fit the person's complex silhouette to create an animatable mesh, and 3) a method for handling partial self occlusions. We compare to state-of-the-art related methods and evaluate results with human studies. Further, we present an interactive interface that allows re-posing the person in 3D, and an augmented reality setup where the animated 3D person can emerge from the photo into the real world. We demonstrate the method on photos, posters, and art.