Align Your Gaussians: Text-to-4D with Dynamic 3D Gaussians and Composed Diffusion Models

Huan Ling, Seung Wook Kim, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler, Karsten Kreis; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 8576-8588

Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized image and video generation and have also been successfully used for optimization-based 3D object synthesis. Here we instead focus on the underexplored text-to-4D setting and synthesize dynamic animated 3D objects using score distillation methods with an additional temporal dimension. Compared to previous work we pursue a novel compositional generation-based approach and combine text-to-image text-to-video and 3D-aware multiview diffusion models to provide feedback during 4D object optimization thereby simultaneously enforcing temporal consistency high-quality visual appearance and realistic geometry. Our method called Align Your Gaussians (AYG) leverages dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting with deformation fields as 4D representation. Crucial to AYG is a novel method to regularize the distribution of the moving 3D Gaussians and thereby stabilize the optimization and induce motion. We also propose a motion amplification mechanism as well as a new autoregressive synthesis scheme to generate and combine multiple 4D sequences for longer generation. These techniques allow us to synthesize vivid dynamic scenes outperform previous work qualitatively and quantitatively and achieve state-of-the-art text-to-4D performance. Due to the Gaussian 4D representation different 4D animations can be seamlessly combined as we demonstrate. AYG opens up promising avenues for animation simulation and digital content creation as well as synthetic data generation.