StepControl generates full-body motion from just foot contact timing
StepControl: Long-Horizon Human Motion Generation from Foot-Contact Schedules
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Summary
People often control animated human motion by telling a computer what action to do or where to move. This paper looks at controlling motion by just telling when each foot touches the ground. The authors created StepControl, a model that generates full-body movement using only these foot contact timings, without needing other details like body positions. Their model follows the foot timing well and can handle changes like stops or limps, showing that just foot contact timing can guide realistic motion.
What this means in practice
- •For game developers: Create character animations that automatically follow precise footstep timings without needing full pose targets, enabling natural and controllable walking or running sequences.$Commercial implications: Enables game studios to offer customizable character movements based on footstep schedules, enhancing animation tools for interactive gameplay.
- •For robotics engineers: Generate human-like walking motions from foot contact patterns to improve robot gait planning and interaction with uneven terrains.
Authors
Hojun Jang, Jinseok Bae, Donggeun Lim, Taesun Kim, Seungbin Jeong, Younghwan Lee, Yong Seok Kim, Young Min Kim
Abstract
Controllable human motion generation has largely focused on specifying what action should occur or where the body should move. We study a complementary question: can full-body motion be controlled by specifying only when each foot contacts the ground? We introduce StepControl, an autoregressive diffusion model conditioned on a future binary left/right foot-contact schedule, without requiring target root and body poses, or semantic prompts. StepControl represents contact as explicit temporal events and injects them through dedicated cross-attention with classifier-free guidance. We further introduce a stochastic mixture noise schedule and warmup strategy for stable long-horizon autoregressive generation. Experiments show that StepControl follows prescribed contact timing more accurately than adapting existing spatially guided motion generators to contact constraints. It maintains effective contact control over long continuous rollouts and responds to edited schedules such as cadence changes, stop-and-go pauses, limping gaits, and bilateral jumping. Our results show that minimal foot-contact schedules provide an effective and intuitive temporal interface for controllable motion generation.