Farm3D vs DeepMotion

Farm3D is a research method for single-view 3D reconstruction of articulated animals, built at the University of Oxford and published at 3DV 2024. You feed it one photo of a horse, cow, or sheep and it returns a full 3D shape with texture in seconds, without training on real photographs. The project page documents the approach, shows reconstruction demos, and links to code and the Animodel benchmark dataset.

Most 3D generators need large labeled 3D datasets or multi-view captures. Farm3D trains entirely on synthetic views produced by Stable Diffusion, then uses the same diffusion model as a critic during learning. That lets it recover fine details like legs and ears on categories it never saw in real images, which is unusual for monocular reconstruction pipelines that rely on real-world supervision.

Researchers studying articulated 3D shape, computer vision engineers prototyping animal asset pipelines, and 3D artists exploring controllable synthesis will find the demos and open code useful. The method also supports relighting, texture swapping between same-category models, and skeletal animation once a shape is generated.

DeepMotion builds 3D character animation from text prompts or reference video through a browser, with no mocap suit required. Its two products, SayMotion and Animate 3D, turn written motion descriptions or uploaded MP4, MOV, and AVI clips into exportable skeleton data for game and film pipelines. Output ships as FBX, BVH, GLB, or MP4 files you can retarget to custom characters.

Traditional motion capture needs specialized hardware and studio space. DeepMotion runs markerless full-body tracking in the cloud, so indie studios and solo animators can produce fight choreography or dance moves from a phone video. SayMotion adds generative inpainting to extend or blend motions beyond stock libraries, which stock animation sites cannot match without manual editing.

Game developers, XR artists, film students, and educators use it to prototype character motion before committing to a full rigging pass. The Free Animation Credit Program lets users earn back credits by labeling motion descriptions or correcting poses in the Rotoscope editor.