Semantics-aware Motion Retargeting with Vision-Language Models
Authors: Haodong Zhang, Zhike Chen, Haocheng Xu, Lei Hao, Xiaofei Wu, Songcen Xu, Zhensong Zhang, Yue Wang, Rong Xiong

Capturing and preserving motion semantics is essential to motion retargeting between animation characters. However most of the previous works neglect the semantic information or rely on human-designed joint-level representations. Here we present a novel Semantics-aware Motion reTargeting (SMT) method with the advantage of vision-language models to extract and maintain meaningful motion semantics. We utilize a differentiable module to render 3D motions. Then the high-level motion semantics are incorporated into the motion retargeting process by feeding the vision-language model with the rendered images and aligning the extracted semantic embeddings. To ensure the preservation of fine-grained motion details and high-level semantics we adopt a two-stage pipeline consisting of skeleton-aware pre-training and fine-tuning with semantics and geometry constraints. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in producing high-quality motion retargeting results while accurately preserving motion semantics. Project page can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/smtnet.