Organizations: Tsinghua University, China · Independent, Beijing, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · SparcAI Inc., USA
Abstract
Live2D is the dominant 2D character-animation format for anime characters and virtual avatars, representing each character as a stack of RGBA layers driven by per-layer mesh deformation. Despite its wide use in virtual streaming, mobile games, and interactive characters, authoring a Live2D model still demands weeks of manual layer separation, occlusion completion, mesh placement, and keyframing, and no prior generative method produces such a structured asset end-to-end. We present the first system that, from a single illustration, generates all the structured information a Live2D runtime consumes: ordered RGBA layers, a deformation mesh per layer, and the parameter-driven keypose vertex offsets that make the character move. Stage 1 casts layered decomposition as a layered diffusion process under a Live2D-aware organ-level taxonomy, producing an ordered RGBA stack with hidden-region completion. Stage 2 builds a content-conforming triangle mesh for each layer from its alpha channel alone, then predicts the keypose displacement field of all layers jointly: every vertex of every layer is one token, self-attention spans layer boundaries, and each displacement is factorised into a bounded direction and a log-magnitude. Joint rather than independent prediction is what makes the result a coherent character instead of separately plausible parts, and is our largest gain; scaling the network 112x yields none. On 50 held-out characters, under true generation with no teacher forcing, Stage 2 attains a per-vertex direction cosine of 0.768 (median 0.828). Because a layer's mesh derives from its alpha channel, a clothing layer can be re-textured from a natural-language instruction while the mesh and predicted animation are reused byte-for-byte. We further contribute Live2D-Bench, the first standardized benchmark for the task, and an 8,884-model Live2D corpus with layer and animation supervision.
Character image animation remains a foundational yet challenging task in computer vision. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into three paradigms: methods based on explicit motion representations suffer from extraction errors and identity drift; methods based on implicit motion features lose fine-grained dynamics through compression; and in-context learning approaches avoid intermediate representations but incur prohibitive computational costs. Furthermore, all current systems are designed for offline synthesis, unable to meet the real-time requirements of interactive applications such as digital avatars and live-streaming hosts. To address these limitations, we present Wan-Animate-2, an end-to-end character animation framework that directly consumes the driving video within a redesigned Diffusion Transformer. Our architecture achieves superior motion fidelity and identity preservation by eliminating intermediate motion extractors entirely. We further introduce text driven viewpoint control that decouples the output camera perspective from the driving video--a capability rarely supported by prior character animation methods that rely on explicit motion representations. Beyond generation quality, we present Wan-Animate-2-Lite, an efficient variant that reduces inference latency to real-time thresholds through a three-stage training paradigm: teacher forcing pretraining with error buffer mechanism, and Self-Forcing distillation with chunk-wise backpropagation. This enables streaming character animation for interactive applications, opening new deployment scenarios that were previously infeasible. Qualitative evaluations and user studies demonstrate that Wan-Animate-2 achieves high-fidelity animation results across diverse characters and motion patterns. To foster further research and community development, we will release the Wan-Animate-2-Base model weights to the public.
We present a lightweight appearance adapter for Stable Diffusion that enables controllable and consistent anime character generation under diverse editing conditions. Instead of relying on large-scale vision-language models or per-subject fine-tuning, our method injects fine-grained visual features from a single reference image into the diffusion process. Based on CLIP emergent local spatialization, we develop semantic-selective local attention. To further disentangle character appearance from spatial layout, we incorporate pose-aware conditioning during adapter training. The resulting pretrained adapter remains compact, modular, and fully compatible with Stable Diffusion community workflows, while requiring no additional fine-tuning at deployment time. Furthermore, we present a high-quality anime character dataset based on curated and restructured Danbooru prompts, and evaluate our method across several practical character editing scenarios. Our code, model weights, and dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.
We present DreamCharacter-1, a lightweight post-adaptation framework that calibrates pretrained 3D foundation models toward high-fidelity, production-ready 3D character generation. Building upon a 3D foundation backbone, our pipeline incorporates three task-oriented components: (1) geometry post-training, which enhances fine-grained surface details through geometric preference optimization; (2) texture post-training, which synthesizes high-resolution textures and refines the appearance of occluded regions; and (3) inference acceleration, which enables scalable deployment. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DreamCharacter-1 produces visually compelling and structurally robust 3D character assets, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art character generation methods.