We study 4D generation to synthesize temporally coherent sequences of 3D geometry for animation and content creation. In contrast to existing SDS-based optimization methods and video-driven animation approaches, we adopt a skeleton-driven animation framework aligned with standard industrial pipelines, which enables explicit control and editing.
The paper introduces the Elastic Shape Variational Autoencoder (ES‑VAE), a geometry‑aware generative model for skeletal pose trajectories that uses the transported square‑root velocity field representation on Kendall's shape manifold to remove rigid transformations and temporal rate variability. ES‑VAE maps sequences to a low‑dimensional latent space via the Riemannian logarithm map and reconstructs them using the exponential map. Experiments on gait analysis for clinical mobility scoring and action recognition on the NTU RGB+D dataset show that ES‑VAE outperforms standard VAEs and several sequence‑modeling baselines.
By Arafat Rahman, Shashwat Kumar, Laura E. Barnes, Anuj Srivastava
UniMate is a unified foundation model that generates articulated motion for any skeleton from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, eliminating the need for test‑time optimization or per‑skeleton retraining. It uses a topology‑aware diffusion transformer that incorporates skeletal topology through graph‑aware attention bias, spectral rotary position embedding, and a global topological conditioner. Trained on the newly curated UniML3D dataset of 13,006 diverse motion sequences, UniMate outperforms existing baselines in quality, generalization, and efficiency, and supports zero‑shot cross‑topology transfer, in‑betweening, expansion, and text‑guided editing.
By Linzhan Mou, Jiahui Lei, Zhiyang Dou, Chenyue Cai, Chaoyue Song, Adam Finkelstein, Szymon Rusinkiewicz
UniMo introduces a unified point‑cloud based framework for generating 3D motion that works for both humans and animals, overcoming challenges posed by diverse skeletal topologies and limited animal datasets. It converts parametric skeletons into unparametric representations and uses dynamic sampling to focus on active joints. The authors also release UniML3D, a large motion‑language dataset with 145,907 sequences and 433,388 captions, and demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on multiple benchmarks.
By Zeyu Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhang, Siheng Wang, Yiran Wang, Danning Li, Ian Reid, Richard Hartley
arXiv:2609.38578v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Cross-structural motion retargeting aims to transfer motion between different skeletal topologies. Despite recent progress, existing state-of-the-art...
By Kia-J\"ung Yang, Fabian H. Sinz, Pawe{\l} A. Pierzchlewicz
arXiv:2606.10142v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent advances in 3D generation have led to substantial improvements in realism, controllability, and efficiency, yet the evaluation of 3D assets...
By Nanshan Jia, Zhenyu Zhao, Junbo Peng, Sui Huang, Jingshen Wang, Zeyu Zheng
Rigging is inherently task-dependent because the same mesh may require different skeletons and deformation behaviors across animation tasks. In practice, artists often inspect an initial rig and repeatedly edit its skeletal structure and deformation behavior to meet specific animation requirements.
arXiv:2601.13913v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We consider monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE), where the goal is to predict 3D human skeletal joints from a single 2D image, typically via 2...
By Pavlo Melnyk, Cuong Le, Urs Waldmann, Per-Erik Forss\'en, Bastian Wandt
MeshCarve introduces a flow‑matching approach that generates artisan meshes entirely within compact latent spaces, separating vertex positions and edge connections to avoid joint encoding issues. It employs a hierarchical sparse transformer backbone with VertexVAE and EdgeVAE, which anchor on discrete vertices to drastically shorten token sequences and use spatial‑aware compression without sacrificing reconstruction quality. The method outperforms state‑of‑the‑art autoregressive and flow‑matching techniques on Objaverse and generalizes to Toys4K, representing one of the first fully compressed latent artisan mesh generators.
By Xiyu Wang, Ruocheng Wu, Yufei Wang, Zhihao Li, Lanqing Guo, Bihan Wen
Driven by the availability of large-scale datasets, Human Pose Estimation (HPE) plays a critical role in numerous downstream tasks. However, mainstream benchmarks exhibit severe representation bias, predominantly featuring able-bodied individuals.
arXiv:2607. 17342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding physical human-robot and human-human interactions is a challenging yet emerging topic in 3D vision.
By Yuhang Wen, Mengyuan Liu, Zixuan Tang, Junsong Yuan, Sirui Li, Beichen Ding
arXiv:2604.28130v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent methods for arbitrary-skeleton motion capture from monocular video follow a factorized pipeline, where a Video-to-Pose network predicts join...
By Kehong Gong, Zhengyu Wen, Dao Thien Phong, Mingxi Xu, Weixia He, Qi Wang, Ning Zhang, Zhengyu Li, Guanli Hou, Dongze Lian, Xiaoyu He, Mingyuan Zhang, Hanwang Zhang