# Follow Your Track: Precise Skeleton Animation Controlled by 3D Trajectories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [L4GM: Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10324/) (2024)
- [CoTracker3: Simpler and Better Point Tracking by Pseudo-Labelling Real Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11831/) (2024)
- [Consistent4D: Consistent 360deg Dynamic Object Generation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02848/) (2023)
- [SpatialTrackerV2: 3D Point Tracking Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12462/) (2025)
- [TC4D: Trajectory-Conditioned Text-to-4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17920/) (2024)
- [SC4D: Sparse-Controlled Video-to-4D Generation and Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03736/) (2024)
- [MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16421/) (2025)
- [DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06756/) (2024)
- [Animate3D: Animating Any 3D Model with Multi-view Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11398/) (2024)
- [RigAnything: Template-Free Autoregressive Rigging for Diverse 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09615/) (2025)
- [One Model to Rig Them All: Diverse Skeleton Rigging with UniRig](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12451/) (2025)
- [Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10898/) (2025)
- [AnyTop: Character Animation Diffusion with Any Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17327/) (2025)
- [V2M4: 4D Mesh Animation Reconstruction from a Single Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09631/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Variation Field Diffusion for High-fidelity Video-to-4D Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23785/) (2025)
- [AnimateAnyMesh: A Feed-Forward 4D Foundation Model for Text-Driven Universal Mesh Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09982/) (2025)
- [DRiVE: Diffusion-based Rigging Empowers Generation of Versatile and Expressive Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17423/) (2024)
- [Make-It-Animatable: An Efficient Framework for Authoring Animation-Ready 3D Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18197/) (2024)
- [MVTokenFlow: High-quality 4D Content Generation using Multiview Token Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11697/) (2025)
- [AR4D: Autoregressive 4D Generation from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01722/) (2025)
- [4Dynamic: Text-to-4D Generation with Hybrid Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12684/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Cepheid: Decoupling Scale from Structure for Cross-Family Motion Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18871/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

4D generation aims to animate 3D objects with realistic motion, holding great promise for applications. Existing methods typically decouple 3D asset generation from motion synthesis: acquire a 3D asset, prepare a structural representation like mesh and Gaussians, and synthesize motion from text or video control signals. However, dense mesh and Gaussian representations incur high computational costs and are prone to temporal artifacts, limiting animation quality and duration to only short clips. Meanwhile, text lacks fine-grained spatial and temporal details such as timing and coordination, while video entangles motion with appearance and background. Together, these limitations result in 4D animations that suffer from poor temporal consistency, wrong identification, and limited controllability. We address these issues with textttACT, a trajectory-conditioned framework for topology-general skeletal animation. ACT uses skeletons as a compact structured and compute-efficient representation and 3D point trajectories from monocular video as explicit motion guidance which provide detailed motion patterns without appearance entanglement. At the core of ACT is a Routed Trajectory Injector, which achieves accurate and robust trajectory-to-joint transfer through three complementary designs: prior-guided hard routing establishes precise skeleton-to-mesh correspondences, global routing enables holistic joint-track interaction for full-body motion awareness, and local windowed cross-attention enforces fine-grained temporal alignment, improving micro-timing and reducing motion misalignment across varying motion rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that textttACT significantly outperforms existing methods in fidelity and temporal consistency.