Multi-Object Sketch Animation with Grouping and Motion Trajectory Priors
This work addresses the challenge of creating high-quality animations from complex sketches, which is important for artists and designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sketch animation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating animations from multi-object vector sketches, which existing methods struggle with due to temporal inconsistency and poor generalization, and achieves significant improvements in quality and consistency over prior approaches.
We introduce GroupSketch, a novel method for vector sketch animation that effectively handles multi-object interactions and complex motions. Existing approaches struggle with these scenarios, either being limited to single-object cases or suffering from temporal inconsistency and poor generalization. To address these limitations, our method adopts a two-stage pipeline comprising Motion Initialization and Motion Refinement. In the first stage, the input sketch is interactively divided into semantic groups and key frames are defined, enabling the generation of a coarse animation via interpolation. In the second stage, we propose a Group-based Displacement Network (GDN), which refines the coarse animation by predicting group-specific displacement fields, leveraging priors from a text-to-video model. GDN further incorporates specialized modules, such as Context-conditioned Feature Enhancement (CCFE), to improve temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality, temporally consistent animations for complex, multi-object sketches, thus expanding the practical applications of sketch animation.