AnimateCanvas: Learning Implicit Motion Planning from Composable Kinematic Cues

Abstract

Professional character animation requires both natural motion and precise, versatile control. For example, creators often define the timing of a specified action, control the motion range of the character's arm swing, or specify the route the character walks through--effectively placing various kinematic cues on a motion canvas. This motivates us to propose AnimateCanvas, a model that supports cue-conditioned implicit motion planning to faithfully and coherently connect all cues, dense or sparse, full or partial, into one full-body motion sequence. Specifically, AnimateCanvas represents heterogeneous kinematic cues on a shared motion canvas, where position and rotation values are specified across body joints and time. A shared flow-matching model generates motion conditioned on this canvas, with optional language and input motion; cue imputation keeps the specified canvas values fixed in both training and sampling. To learn coherent completion across different cue sets, we train with a compositional cue sampler that varies the timing of cue application, the positions or rotations specified, and how they are combined. Together, these designs enable a single generator to integrate heterogeneous kinematic cues into coherent full-body actions, giving creators fine-grained control over selected frames, joints, and position or rotation channels. We evaluate this planning ability on temporal, root, and body-part cues--alone and combined--as well as language-guided editing, and naturally extend it to sequential generation and motion repair. AnimateCanvas achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal completion, spatial control, sequential generation, language-guided editing, and motion repair, while retaining strong text-to-motion capability.