Wan2.1 + SCAIL for Animating Images for Movement

Overview

SCAIL is a pose‑guided character animation model built on top of a Wan 2.x image‑to‑video backbone. It takes three key inputs: a reference image (your character), a driving pose sequence (usually extracted from a motion or dance video), and a text prompt for style/context, then outputs a temporally stable animation where the character matches the driving poses frame by frame. Compared with older pose systems (like Wan Animate), SCAIL uses a 3D‑consistent pose representation and full‑context pose injection, which gives better depth handling, fewer broken limbs, and more accurate tracking of fast zooms and complex motions.​​

How Wan 2.1 and SCAIL work together

Under the hood, SCAIL uses Wan 2.1 (or Wan 2.x) as the diffusion‑transformer video model, injecting pose and identity signals into Wan’s latent space.​

• Pose: NLF, ViTPose, and DWPose (or OpenPose‑style) detectors extract skeletons from a driving video, which SCAIL converts into 3D‑aware pose maps that respect depth and occlusion.​​

• Identity: The reference image is encoded with CLIP and converted into WanVideo image embeddings so the generated frames keep the same face, outfit, and colors throughout long sequences.​​

• Video generation: Wan 2.1 then runs diffusion over time using text, identity, and pose together, producing 512–720p clips that closely follow the source motion while retaining your original art style or photo appearance.​

Who can use this workflow

Animating images with Wan 2.1 + SCAIL pose is useful for:

• Creators making TikTok/shorts content, mapping dance or trending motions from real videos onto AI characters or avatars.​​

• VTubers and character artists turning a single illustration or render into high‑fidelity animated performances (dancing, walking, acting).​​

• Game and animation teams prototyping cutscenes, fight choreography, or multi‑character interactions without full 3D rigs.​​

• ComfyUI power users building pose‑driven workflows for consistent character animation from images, with fine control over sequence length, fps, and style.​​

Typical ComfyUI workflow

A common Wan 2.1 + SCAIL pose pipeline looks like this:

1. Prepare inputs

• Choose or generate a clean reference image (full‑body or mid‑shot) of your character at the target aspect ratio.​​

• Pick a driving video (for example, a dance or movement clip) and extract poses using ViTPose/DWPose or OpenPose nodes; SCAIL converts these into its internal 3D‑aware pose format.​​

2. Configure SCAIL + Wan 2.1

• Load a SCAIL‑tuned Wan 2.1 I2V model (for example, a Wan SCAIL checkpoint) in ComfyUI and connect the reference image embeddings plus SCAIL pose sequence into the Wan sampler.​​

• Add a short style prompt such as “cinematic studio footage of the character, soft lighting, 24 fps” and set resolution (often 512×768 or 576×1024) and frame count according to your hardware.​

3. Generate and refine

• Run the sampler to produce an initial clip; if pose is misaligned, tweak pose extraction (cleaner source video, fewer occlusions) or lower pose/CFG strength so motion and appearance balance better.​

• Once the motion looks right, send frames through interpolation and upscaling (for example, SVD, GIMM‑VFI, SeedVR) to reach smoother 30 fps and 720p–1080p output ready for editing and posting.​​

Used this way, Wan 2.1 + SCAIL turns static character images into studio‑grade motion clips that follow real‑world poses very closely while keeping your design and style intact.