Animated Drawings
Animated Drawings is Meta's free, open-source project that brings hand-drawn characters to life. Snap a photo of a doodle, and the AI figures out the figure, builds a skeleton, and makes it dance, jump or wave using motion capture data.
Quick Facts
| Developer | Meta AI (Facebook AI Research) |
|---|---|
| First released | 2022 |
| How it works | Detectron2 pose estimation plus motion capture retargeting |
| Language | Python (PyTorch) |
| License | MIT, free and open source |
| Pricing | Free |
What is Animated Drawings?
Animated Drawings is a research project from Meta AI that does something magical: it animates children's drawings. You photograph a hand-drawn character, the software separates the figure from the paper, estimates its joints, and then retargets motion capture clips onto it so the doodle dances, walks and waves.
The project came out of a 2022 research paper, and the companion web demo at sketches.metademolab.com went viral. Families around the world uploaded crayon drawings and watched them come alive, and the underlying code was released openly on GitHub.
Technically it is a pipeline: Detectron2 detects the human figure and keypoints, the drawing is extracted and cleaned, a rig is fitted, and motion capture clips from the AMASS dataset are retargeted onto the 2D character. The result is surprisingly natural motion from a two-second doodle.
Key Features
- Automatic figure extraction from photos of drawings
- Pose estimation and skeleton fitting for human-like characters
- Motion retargeting from motion capture data
- Support for multiple characters in one scene
- Ready-to-use web demo that needs no installation
- Open-source Python implementation for custom use
- Adjustable animation settings like motion style and speed
How to get started
The easiest way is the web demo: open sketches.metademolab.com, upload a photo of a drawing with a single human-like character, wait a few seconds, and watch it animate. You can choose motions and download the result as a GIF or video.
For developers, clone the GitHub repository and run the pipeline locally with Python and PyTorch. You provide an image, and the tool outputs the animated result, with options to customize the character mask and motion.
- Visit the sketches.metademolab.com demo
- Upload a clear photo of a hand-drawn character
- Adjust the crop so the character fills the frame
- Pick a motion and generate the animation
- Download as GIF or video, or try the open-source pipeline
Use cases
- Family fun: animating kids' drawings in minutes
- Classroom projects and creative coding workshops
- Research on pose estimation and motion retargeting
- Making unique animated content for social media
- Prototyping character animation ideas quickly
Pricing and licensing
Animated Drawings is completely free. The web demo is free to use, and the code is open source under the MIT license, which allows personal, educational and commercial use with very few restrictions.
The demo itself is hosted by Meta and may carry usage limits. If you want to run animations at scale or integrate the tech into a product, use the open-source repository and run it on your own hardware.
Pros and cons
The wow factor is off the charts, and the whole thing is free, fast and dead simple to try. For human-like doodles the motion quality is genuinely impressive, and it is a wonderful introduction to how pose estimation and retargeting work.
The limits are real: it is tuned for single, human-like characters drawn in a front-facing pose. Complex scenes, multiple overlapping figures or non-human designs confuse it, and there is little control over the final animation compared with a full animation tool.
Alternatives
- Viggle: drop any character image into a reference motion video
- Adobe Character Animator: puppeteer your art live with camera and mic
- Live2D Cubism: professional 2D character animation for VTubers
- OpenToonz: full traditional animation, no AI involved