# Animating the Uncaptured: Humanoid Mesh Animation with Video Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [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)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [The KIT Motion-Language Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03827/) (2016)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14334/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08535/) (2020)
- [CAT4D: Create Anything in 4D with Multi-View Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18613/) (2024)
- [SV4D: Dynamic 3D Content Generation with Multi-Frame and Multi-View Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17470/) (2024)
- [DeepCut: Joint Subset Partition and Labeling for Multi Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06645/) (2015)
- [VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02492/) (2025)
- [4Diffusion: Multi-view Video Diffusion Model for 4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20674/) (2024)
- [Diffusion 3D Features (Diff3F): Decorating Untextured Shapes with Distilled Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17024/) (2023)
- [GenZI: Zero-Shot 3D Human-Scene Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17737/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10898/) (2025)
- [The Quest for Generalizable Motion Generation: Data, Model, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26794/) (2025)
- [AnimaX: Animating the Inanimate in 3D with Joint Video-Pose Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19851/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Animation of humanoid characters is essential in various graphics applications, but requires significant time and cost to create realistic animations. We propose an approach to synthesize 4D animated sequences of input static 3D humanoid meshes, leveraging strong generalized motion priors from generative video models -- as such video models contain powerful motion information covering a wide variety of human motions. From an input static 3D humanoid mesh and a text prompt describing the desired animation, we synthesize a corresponding video conditioned on a rendered image of the 3D mesh. We then employ an underlying SMPL representation to animate the corresponding 3D mesh according to the video-generated motion, based on our motion optimization. This enables a cost-effective and accessible solution to enable the synthesis of diverse and realistic 4D animations.