  Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of
its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently,
application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements
in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited
by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to
poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we
introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model
which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text
datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works.
Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated
large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from
image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding
additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion
models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture
similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion
realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches
state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation.
