Generating Past and Future in Digital Painting Processes

We present a framework to generate past and future processes for drawing process videos. Given a canvas image uploaded by a user, the framework can generate both preceding and succeeding states of the drawing process, and the generated states can be reused as inputs for further state generation. We observe that the user queries typically have one-to-one or many-to-many states, and in many cases, involve non-contiguous states. This necessitates a backend that solves a set-to-set problem with arbitrary combinations of past or future states. To this end, we repurpose video diffusion models to learn the set-to-set mapping with pretrained video priors. We implement the system with strong diffusion transformer backbones ( e.g. , CogVideoX and LTXVideo) and high-quality data processing ( e.g. , sampling short shots from long videos of real drawing records). Experiments show that the generated states are diverse in drawing contexts and resemble human drawing processes. This capability may aid artists in visualizing potential outcomes, generating creative inspirations, or refining existing workflows.