Animated Drawings

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Meta research demo that brings hand-drawn characters to life as animations

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Animated Drawings

What it is

Animated Drawings is a research project from Meta's FAIR team that turns drawings of human-like figures, including children's art, into short animations. In the free web demo you upload a photo of a drawing, confirm the box around the character, adjust the automatically detected outline and joint positions, and then pick a motion such as dancing, walking or jumping. Behind the scenes, the system detects the figure, separates it from the background, estimates its pose and retargets motion capture data onto it. The underlying code, model weights and an amateur drawings dataset were released on GitHub under the MIT license, so developers can run it locally, though the repository is now archived.

Key features

Animate drawings from a photo
Editable outline and joint positions
Library of preset motions
Open-source code and models

What we liked

+ Completely free web demo
+ Fun and easy for families
+ Open source under MIT license

Worth noting

· Works best on human-like figures
· Research project with no active updates

Editor's notes

More context from AI BirdView

Few AI demos are as instantly charming as this one. Hand it a crayon drawing and a minute later the character is dancing across the screen. The research behind it tackles a hard problem, since children's drawings rarely follow realistic proportions, and the result is something families, teachers and artists can enjoy without any setup.

Detects the drawn figure and separates it from the paper background
Lets you correct the outline and joint positions before animating
Applies motion capture clips such as dancing, walking and jumping
Runs free in the browser with no installation
Code, model weights and a drawings dataset published under the MIT license

It is best for parents, educators and hobbyists looking for a creative weekend project, and for developers who want to study or extend the method. For cleaner results, draw on plain white paper with a dark marker, keep arms and legs clearly separated from the body, and photograph the page flat in good light. Kids especially love choosing the motion, so let them try several and compare.