Write-An-Animation: High-level Text-based Animation Editing with Character-Scene Interaction

3D animation production for storytelling requires essential manual processes of virtual scene composition, character creation, and motion editing, etc. Although professional artists can favorably create 3D animations using software, it remains a complex and challenging task for novice users to handle and learn such tools for content creation. In this paper, we present Write-An-Animation, a 3D animation system that allows novice users to create, edit, preview, and render animations, all through text editing. Based on the input texts describing virtual scenes and human motions in natural languages, our system first parses the texts as semantic scene graphs, then retrieves 3D object models for virtual scene composition and motion clips for character animation. Character motion is synthesized with the combination of generative locomotions using neural state machine as well as template action motions retrieved from the dataset. Moreover, to make the virtual scene layout compatible with character motion, we propose an iterative scene layout and character motion optimization algorithm that jointly considers character-object collision and interaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with customized texts and public film scripts. Experimental results indicate that our system can generate satisfactory animations from texts.