Text-Driven Artistic Staging: Pose, Lighting, and Camera References from Paintings

Abstract

Artists coordinate human pose, illumination, and camera placement to convey narrative and emotion, but existing generative methods typically model these elements independently. We introduce text-to-editable 3D staging, a task that jointly generates human poses, a dominant light, and a camera configuration from an affective description. We construct 11,911 text--staging pairs from 2,328 figurative paintings by reconstructing SMPL bodies, estimating low-frequency illumination, recovering camera parameters, and pairing each scene with ArtEmis descriptions. We train a flow-matching transformer that supports variable numbers of figures and produces multiple staging alternatives for each prompt. On held-out descriptions, the model achieves 32.2\% retrieval R@1, compared with 16.6\% for CLIP-based nearest-neighbor retrieval, while approximately preserving corpus-level diversity. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating editable, emotionally conditioned 3D staging references from text.