The great race to animate the digital universe just got a huge infusion of kinetic energy.
Today, Chinese tech giant Tencent officially unveiled Tencent HY Motion 1.0, a groundbreaking generative AI model designed to translate simple text prompts into complex, high fidelity 3D human animations.
This is a major accomplishment for computer graphics. With more than 1 billion parameters, HY Motion 1.0 is one of the largest models designed for the text to motion sector, and with a vision to streamline what has historically been one of the most arduous components in game development, film production and metaverse creation, animation.
The Engine Room: DiT and Flow Matching
The unique feature of HY Motion 1.0 amongst past animation generators is its global and intelligent architecture. Instead, Tencent researchers describe how they have ditched previous approaches for the state of the art Diffusion Transformer design.
As with the trend observed in high resolution image and video generation models over the past two years, HY Motion replaces standard convolution backbones with a scalable Transformer architecture.
This enables the model to deal with long temporal sequences of complex human motions and understand such motion data at an unparalleled depth, hence performing movements that are less robotic but more anatomically sensible over longer periods of time.
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Additionally, the model uses Flow Matching, which is a recent generative framework. Flow Matching provides a more efficient and robust realization than classic diffusion noise scheduling.
With a more direct route from random noise to structured data, Flow Matching allows HY Motion 1.0 to produce smoother transitions and higher fidelity motion sequences faster than ever before.
Redefining Character Animation
The sheer size of the parameters and this sophisticated hybrid architecture make it possible for HY Motion 1.0 to deal with very diverse prompts.
It can create everything from routine activities like a person looking down at their phone while waiting for a bus to action packed sequences like a gymnast leaps during a floor exercise with a final tumbling pass.
The result is production ready rigged animation data that can be applied directly to 3D characters in engines like Unreal or Unity. For Tencent, a leader in gaming around the world, the consequences are already playing out.
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HY Motion 1.0 could cut the time and costs of motion capture and manual keyframing by as much as 90 percent, democratizing top quality animation for indie developers and speeding up pipelines for AAA studios.
