Shape-Conditioned Human Motion Diffusion Model with Mesh Representation

Kebing Xue1, Hyewon Seo1, Cédric Bobenrieth1, Guoliang Luo2
1ICube, University of Strasbourg, CNRS, France 2East China Jiaotong University, China
Computer Graphics Forum, 2025

SMD generates realistic human motion directly as a sequence of meshes, conditioned on a target body shape and a text or action prompt — without requiring any source motion or post-hoc skinning.

Abstract

Human motion synthesis is an important task in computer graphics and computer vision. While focusing on various conditioning signals such as text, action class, or audio to guide the generation process, most existing methods utilize skeleton-based pose representation, requiring additional skinning to produce renderable meshes. Given that human motion is a complex interplay of bones, joints, and muscles, considering solely the skeleton for generation may neglect their inherent interdependency, which can limit the variability and precision of the generated results. To address this issue, we propose a Shape-conditioned Motion Diffusion model (SMD), which enables the generation of motion sequences directly in mesh format, conditioned on a specified target mesh. In SMD, the input meshes are transformed into spectral coefficients using graph Laplacian, to efficiently represent meshes. Subsequently, we propose a Spectral-Temporal Autoencoder (STAE) to leverage cross-temporal dependencies within the spectral domain. Extensive experimental evaluations show that SMD not only produces vivid and realistic motions but also achieves competitive performance in text-to-motion and action-to-motion tasks when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Method

Quantitative Results

Text-to-motion comparison on HumanML3D: FID, R-Precision, Diversity, Penetrate, Float and Skate metrics

Text-to-motion evaluation on HumanML3D. Beyond the standard FID, R-Precision and Diversity metrics, we report physical-plausibility measures — ground penetration, floating and foot skating. SMD achieves the best Diversity, Penetrate and Float scores and competitive FID, demonstrating that generating motion directly in mesh format yields more physically plausible results than skeleton-based baselines.

Action-to-motion comparison: FID and Accuracy for skeleton vs. mesh representations

Action-to-motion evaluation. Compared against the ground truth and MDM, our mesh-based variant SMD (mesh) obtains the best FID and Accuracy, outperforming its skeleton-based counterpart and confirming the benefit of the mesh representation for recognizable, high-fidelity action generation.

BibTeX

@article{xue2025shape,
  title={Shape-Conditioned Human Motion Diffusion Model with Mesh Representation},
  author={Xue, Kebing and Seo, Hyewon and Bobenrieth, C{\'e}dric and Luo, Guoliang},
  journal={Computer Graphics Forum},
  year={2025},
  doi={10.1111/cgf.70065},
  publisher={Wiley}
}