Cross-Morphology Motion Transfer with Semantic Style Alignment.
TL;DR
This work introduces a framework for cross-morphology motion transfer with semantic style alignment that uses morphology-agnostic control signals (e.g., velocity, angular velocity, relative height) to align behaviors across species.
Abstract
Transferring animations between characters with diverse skeletal structures is challenging. Traditional retargeting pipelines rely on fixed correspondences, canonical skeletons, or human-centric datasets, which can lead to artifacts when applied across heterogeneous morphologies. We introduce a framework for cross-morphology motion transfer with semantic style alignment that uses morphology-agnostic control signals (e.g., velocity, angular velocity, relative height) to align behaviors across species. Our method supports all-to-all retargeting: motions from any source can be mapped to any trained target while preserving target-specific style. For each target morphology, we train a Vector Quantized VAE and an autoregressive sequence model to construct a compact, morphology-specific codebook that captures stylistic priors. This modular design scales to new morphologies without retraining existing models and allows optional user control (e.g., phase, velocity scaling) for fine-grained alignment. Experiments across bipeds and quadrupeds demonstrate accurate, plausible, and style-faithful motion transfer, establishing a scalable approach to retargeting across arbitrary skeletal topologies.