Tencent open-sources HunyuanVideo-Avatar for singing digital humans

HunyuanVideo-Avatar is a new open-source video generation model from Tencent Hunyuan and Tencent Music that turns static character portraits into singing and talking avatars using just an audio track.

What it can do

Feed it a single image and an audio clip up to 14 seconds, and the model animates the portrait with synchronized lips, matching facial expressions, and dynamic full-body motions.

It handles photorealistic humans, anime illustrations, 3D character renders, and anthropomorphic animals across portraits, waist-up shots, and full-body frames. Unlike older talking-head tools where only the mouth moves like a cutout, HunyuanVideo-Avatar generates fluid motion across both foreground subjects and backgrounds.

While the architecture is designed for multi-character dialogue, the initial open-source release focuses on single-character animation. The multi-character mode is scheduled to drop soon.

How it works and hardware requirements

Under the hood, the model runs on a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture. Tencent swapped out traditional addition-based conditioning for a dedicated character image injection module, fixing the mismatch between training and inference while preserving identity across heavy motion.

It also packs an Audio Emotion Module to pull subtle expression cues from reference images, plus a Face-Aware Audio Adapter that masks faces in latent space so different voices can steer different characters without cross-talk.

For inference, the repository supports 8-GPU parallel generation for 704-resolution, 129-frame clips using DeepCache and flow shift.

If you do not have an enterprise cluster, you can still run it locally. Tencent included a dedicated single-GPU script supporting FP8 precision and CPU offloading, making it viable on consumer-grade hardware with tighter VRAM budgets.

Where to try it and availability

The single-character weights and code are live on GitHub and Hugging Face, alongside a technical report on arXiv.

If you just want to test the outputs without touching a terminal, Tencent has hosted a web demo on the Hunyuan platform. The technology is already running in production across multiple apps under Tencent Music Entertainment Group for short-video creation and virtual marketing.

Why it matters

If you create content, build games, or produce social ads, this is worth checking out immediately. Generating expressive singing or emotional dialogue previously required tedious rigging or fragile face-tracking pipelines. HunyuanVideo-Avatar reduces that to an audio file and a flat image.

Compared to existing open-source talking avatar projects, Tencent pulls ahead in motion intensity and emotional nuance rather than settling for stiff lip-syncing. Running high-res video locally still takes patience and decent hardware, but releasing FP8 weights on day one makes this a genuinely accessible production asset.