3DProxyImg: Controllable 3D-Aware Animation Synthesis from Single Image via 2D-3D Aligned Proxy Embedding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight framework for 3D animation from a single image that balances high-quality rendering with precise 3D control, using a novel proxy representation to enable efficient, interactive, and coherent animations.

Contribution

It proposes a 2D-3D aligned proxy representation that decouples geometry from appearance, enabling controllable 3D animation without heavy computation or accurate geometry.

Findings

Outperforms video-based methods in identity preservation and consistency.

Enables efficient animation on low-power devices.

Provides high levels of user control and interaction.

Abstract

3D animation is central to modern visual media, yet traditional production pipelines remain labor-intensive, expertise-demanding, and computationally expensive. Recent AIGC-based approaches partially automate asset creation and rigging, but they either inherit the heavy costs of full 3D pipelines or rely on video-synthesis paradigms that sacrifice 3D controllability and interactivity. We focus on single-image 3D animation generation and argue that progress is fundamentally constrained by a trade-off between rendering quality and 3D control. To address this limitation, we propose a lightweight 3D animation framework that decouples geometric control from appearance synthesis. The core idea is a 2D-3D aligned proxy representation that uses a coarse 3D estimate as a structural carrier, while delegating high-fidelity appearance and view synthesis to learned image-space generative priors. This proxy formulation enables 3D-aware motion control and interaction comparable to classical pipelines, without requiring accurate geometry or expensive optimization, and naturally extends to coherent background animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves efficient animation generation on low-power platforms and outperforms video-based 3D animation generation in identity preservation, geometric and textural consistency, and the level of precise, interactive control it offers to users.