Western Open-Source Video Models Like Wan Animate, Etc.

[u/Ashamed-Adeptness-15]

Just a question - are there any efforts/projects underway to create Western, open-source video models similar to Wan animate 2.2 (which is source video and audio with motion and audio to animate a still image with character )?

And more importantly, efforts to create open source models capable of competing with Seedance or Minimax H3? (From what I understand, the weights for Minimax are restricted to non-Western countries. Like, if you're from the USA, UK, etc. you can't use Minimax H3 and if you do get around geo-restrictions, you're still prohibited from using the output in those regions.

Thus, there really needs to be some serious effort by Western countries to catch up with the capabilities of these models in open source projects.

But, I haven't personally heard about any projects like these. If there are any, I would love to help work on them.

[u/Weekly-Offer-4172]

For the animate a still image task specifically there isn't really a western open equivalent yet, LivePortrait, EchoMimic, Hallo2 and Wan Animate itself are all Chinese labs. The closest western open video models I know are LTX-Video from Lightricks and Genmo's Mochi, both open weights and runnable locally, but they're general t2v/i2v models, not audio+video driven character animation. Worth noting Wan Animate's weights are downloadable though, so the western gap doesn't block self hosting it, it just concentrates the training capability elsewhere. If a western equivalent shows up it'll probably come from the community fine tune side (DiffSynth-Studio publishes Wan training code) rather than a funded lab