AniMimic: Imitating 3D Animation from Video Priors

Creating realistic 3D animation remains a time-consuming and expertise-dependent process, requiring manual rigging, keyframing, and fine-tuning of complex motions. Meanwhile, video diffusion models have recently demonstrated remarkable 2D motion imagination, generating dynamic and visually coherent motion from text or image prompts. However, their outputs lack explicit 3D structure and cannot be directly used for animation or simulation. We present AniMimic, a framework that animates static 3D meshes using motion priors learned from video diffusion models. Starting from an input mesh, AniMimic synthesizes a monocular animation video, automatically constructs a skeleton with skinning weights, and refines its joint parameters through differentiable rendering and video-based supervision. To further enhance realism, we integrate a differentiable simulation module that refines mesh deformation through physically grounded soft-tissue dynamics. Our method bridges the creativity of video diffusion and the structural control of 3D rigged animation, producing physically plausible, temporally coherent, and artist-editable motion sequences that integrate seamlessly into standard animation pipelines.