Free guide · Oct 2, 2026

Animate any 3D character from one sentence

Run UniMate in your browser or locally and turn a text prompt into motion for humans, animals and creatures.

The short version

UniMate is a free, open source research model from Princeton, UC Berkeley, MIT and NTU, accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2026. You give it a rigged 3D character and a sentence like "an object flaps its wings", and it generates the motion. The same model handles humans, four-legged animals, birds, sea creatures, insects, snakes and rigged objects, with no retraining per skeleton.

•What you need for the free look: a browser. The interactive demo plays the team's results in 3D.

•What you need to run it: a Linux machine with an NVIDIA GPU (the pinned PyTorch build is for CUDA 12.4), conda with Python 3.10, and about 3 GB of downloads for the cheapest run.

What's in the full guide

  1. 01Step 1: Try the interactive demo first
  2. 02Which model to download
  3. 03Step 2: Set up the environment
  4. 04Step 3: Build the skeleton data the model reads
  5. 05Step 4: Download a model
  6. 06Step 5: Write your prompts and generate
  7. 07Step 6: Put the motion on a real mesh
  8. 08Honest notes
  9. 09Where to go next

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