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WAN-ANIMATE: UNIFIED CHARACTER ANIMATION AND REPLACEMENT WITH HOLISTIC REPLICATION

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Paper Summary

Paperzilla title
Wan-Animate: Open-Source Character Animation Makes Waves

This paper introduces Wan-Animate, a new open-source framework for animating and replacing characters in videos, built upon the Wan-I2V model. It uses a modified input paradigm and control signals for body motion and facial expressions to create more realistic and expressive character animations, even outperforming some closed-source commercial products.

Explain Like I'm Five

Imagine putting your face on a movie character and making them do what you want! Wan-Animate lets you do that with any character and video.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

The authors are from the HumanAIGC Team at Tongyi Lab, Alibaba, which might suggest a conflict of interest related to promoting their own technology. However, the commitment to open-sourcing the model mitigates this concern.

Identified Limitations

Limited Evaluation on Non-Humanoid Characters
While the paper mentions the potential for animating non-humanoid characters, the evaluation primarily focuses on human subjects. More testing is needed to confirm its effectiveness on diverse character types.
Reliance on Existing Models
The framework builds upon existing models like Wan-I2V and VitPose. Its performance is therefore dependent on the limitations of these underlying models.
Computational Cost
The use of DiT-based models suggests a high computational cost, which may limit accessibility for users with less powerful hardware.

Rating Explanation

This paper presents a strong contribution to the field of character animation with its unified framework and impressive results, exceeding current open-source alternatives and rivaling closed-source solutions. While some limitations exist regarding evaluation on non-humanoid characters and computational costs, the open-sourcing of the model and its innovative approach warrant a high rating.

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File Information

Original Title: WAN-ANIMATE: UNIFIED CHARACTER ANIMATION AND REPLACEMENT WITH HOLISTIC REPLICATION
Uploaded: September 18, 2025 at 02:13 PM
Privacy: Public