Xiaohan Zhang (PhD Student)

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while
allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis.
Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking
the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these
limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human
motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling
semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in
simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text
control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and
fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical
plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also
preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over
obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a
hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent,
goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is
complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric
details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically
plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text
alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion
styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel
diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to
complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts.
Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our
code, dataset, and models will be released at
\url{https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/}.