NECromancer: Breathing Life into Skeletons via BVH Animation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06548v1
• Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:52:29 GMT
• Title: NECromancer: Breathing Life into Skeletons via BVH Animation
• Abstract summary: Motion tokenization is a key component of generalizable motion models.<n>We propose NECromancer (NEC), a universal motion tokenizer that operates directly on arbitrary BVH skeletons.<n>The resulting token space supports cross-species motion transfer, composition, denoising, generation with token-based models, and text-motion retrieval.
• Score: 25.254783224309477
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Motion tokenization is a key component of generalizable motion models, yet most existing approaches are restricted to species-specific skeletons, limiting their applicability across diverse morphologies. We propose NECromancer (NEC), a universal motion tokenizer that operates directly on arbitrary BVH skeletons. NEC consists of three components: (1) an Ontology-aware Skeletal Graph Encoder (OwO) that encodes structural priors from BVH files, including joint semantics, rest-pose offsets, and skeletal topology, into skeletal embeddings; (2) a Topology-Agnostic Tokenizer (TAT) that compresses motion sequences into a universal, topology-invariant discrete representation; and (3) the Unified BVH Universe (UvU), a large-scale dataset aggregating BVH motions across heterogeneous skeletons. Experiments show that NEC achieves high-fidelity reconstruction under substantial compression and effectively disentangles motion from skeletal structure. The resulting token space supports cross-species motion transfer, composition, denoising, generation with token-based models, and text-motion retrieval, establishing a unified framework for motion analysis and synthesis across diverse morphologies. Demo page: https://animotionlab.github.io/NECromancer/

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