# Make-An-Animation: Large-Scale Text-conditional 3D Human Motion Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Language2Pose: Natural Language Grounded Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01108/) (2019)
- [FLAME: Free-form Language-based Motion Synthesis & Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00349/) (2022)
- [Synthesis of Compositional Animations from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14675/) (2021)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Prediction via Spatio-Temporal Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05478/) (2018)
- [Playing for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07588/) (2021)
- [Implicit Neural Representations for Variable Length Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13694/) (2022)
- [MoDi: Unconditional Motion Synthesis from Diverse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08010/) (2022)
- [Style and Pose Control for Image Synthesis of Humans from a Single Monocular View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11263/) (2021)
- [Text Guided Person Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05118/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16097/) (2023)
- [Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16051/) (2023)
- [HOI-Diff: Text-Driven Synthesis of 3D Human-Object Interactions using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06553/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Diffusion for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation: Redundant Representations, Evaluation, and Masked Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16575/) (2024)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [FaceTalk: Audio-Driven Motion Diffusion for Neural Parametric Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08459/) (2023)
- [Sora as a World Model? A Complete Survey on Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05131/) (2024)
- [StableMoFusion: Towards Robust and Efficient Diffusion-based Motion Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05691/) (2024)
- [OMG: Towards Open-vocabulary Motion Generation via Mixture of Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08985/) (2023)
- [MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14729/) (2023)
- [Anim-Director: A Large Multimodal Model Powered Agent for Controllable Animation Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09787/) (2024)
- [HOIGPT: Learning Long Sequence Hand-Object Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19157/) (2025)
- [Absolute Coordinates Make Motion Generation Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19377/) (2025)
- [M2D2M: Multi-Motion Generation from Text with Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14502/) (2024)
- [MotionScript: Natural Language Descriptions for Expressive 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12634/) (2023)
- [Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11375/) (2024)
- [AnimaX: Animating the Inanimate in 3D with Joint Video-Pose Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19851/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap between Human Motion and Action Semantics via Kinematic Phrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04189/) (2023)
- [BAD: Bidirectional Auto-regressive Diffusion for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10847/) (2024)
- [RL from Physical Feedback: Aligning Large Motion Models with Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12769/) (2025)
- [MotionMix: Weakly-Supervised Diffusion for Controllable Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11115/) (2024)
- [Motion-2-To-3: Leveraging 2D Motion Data for 3D Motion Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13111/) (2024)
- [Exploring Text-to-Motion Generation with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09445/) (2024)
- [Textual Decomposition Then Sub-motion-space Scattering for Open-Vocabulary Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04079/) (2024)
- [Text-driven Motion Generation: Overview, Challenges and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09379/) (2025)
- [Motion Generation: A Survey of Generative Approaches and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05419/) (2025)
- [MCM: Multi-condition Motion Synthesis Framework for Multi-scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03031/) (2023)
- [AnimateMe: 4D Facial Expressions via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17213/) (2024)
- [Geometric Neural Distance Fields for Learning Human Motion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09667/) (2025)
- [Interact2Ar: Full-Body Human-Human Interaction Generation via Autoregressive Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19692/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.