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3D rendering of dynamic face captures is a challenging problem, and it demands improvements on several fronts\\(x2014\\)photorealism, efficiency, compatibility, and configurability. We present a novel representation that enables high-quality volumetric rendering of an actor's dynamic facial performances with minimal compute and memory footprint. It runs natively on commodity graphics soft- and hardware, and allows for a graceful trade-off between quality and efficiency. Our method utilizes recent advances in neural rendering, particularly learning discrete radiance manifolds to sparsely sample the scene to model volumetric effects. We achieve efficient modeling by learning a single set of manifolds for the entire dynamic sequence, while implicitly modeling appearance changes as temporal canonical texture. We export a single layered mesh and view-independent RGBA texture video that is compatible with legacy graphics renderers without additional ML integration. We demonstrate our method by rendering dynamic face captures of real actors in a game engine, at comparable photorealism to state-of-the-art neural rendering techniques at previously unseen frame rates.

We introduce a probabilistic splat-based radiance field framework that retains the fast rasterization and test-time efficiency of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) while replacing heuristic primitive manipulation with gradient-based optimization of a volumetric probability density. Rather than relocating, splitting, or culling Gaussians via hand-tuned densification (e.g., ADC), we treat primitive locations as samples drawn from a persistent, learnable density. We instantiate this density using a novel, memory-efficient multi-scale hierarchical grid that enables end-to-end gradient-based optimization. To stabilize the optimization, we derive an unbiased gradient estimator with control variates that markedly reduces variance. By allowing probability mass to flow to where the loss demands, our framework eliminates brittle priors and naturally explores the volume, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality on mip-NeRF 360 while preserving 3DGS-level rendering speed.

Face registration deforms a template mesh to closely fit a 3D face scan, the quality of which commonly degrades in non-skin regions (e.g., hair, beard, accessories), because the optimized template-to-scan distance pulls the template mesh towards the noisy scan surface. Improving registration quality requires a clean separation of skin and non-skin regions on the scan mesh. Existing image-based (2D) or scan-based (3D) segmentation methods however perform poorly. Image-based segmentation outputs multi-view inconsistent masks, and they cannot account for scan inaccuracies or scan-image misalignment, while scan-based methods suffer from lower spatial resolution compared to images. In this work, we introduce a novel method that accurately separates skin from non-skin geometry on 3D human head scans. For this, our method extracts features from multi-view images using a frozen image foundation model and aggregates these features in 3D. These lifted 2D features are then fused with 3D geometric features extracted from the scan mesh, to then predict a segmentation mask directly on the scan mesh. We show that our segmentations improve the registration accuracy over pure 2D or 3D segmentation methods by 8.89% and 14.3%, respectively. Although trained only on synthetic data, our model generalizes well to real data.

We present Relightable Holoported Characters (RHC), a novel person-specific method for free-view rendering and relighting of full-body and highly dynamic humans solely observed from sparse-view RGB videos at inference. In contrast to classical one-light-at-a-time (OLAT)-based human relighting, our transformer-based RelightNet predicts relit appearance within a single network pass, avoiding costly OLAT-basis capture and generation. For training such a model, we introduce a new capture strategy and dataset recorded in a multi-view lightstage, where we alternate frames lit by random environment maps with uniformly lit tracking frames, simultaneously enabling accurate motion tracking and diverse illumination as well as dynamics coverage. Inspired by the rendering equation, we derive physics-informed features that encode geometry, albedo, shading, and the virtual camera view from a coarse human mesh proxy and the input views. Our RelightNet then takes these features as input and cross-attends them with a novel lighting condition, and regresses the relit appearance in the form of texel-aligned 3D Gaussian splats attached to the coarse mesh proxy. Consequently, our RelightNet implicitly learns to efficiently compute the rendering equation for novel lighting conditions within a single feed-forward pass. Experiments demonstrate our method's superior visual fidelity and lighting reproduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/RHC/

Sparse volumetric reconstruction and rendering via 3D Gaussian splatting have recently enabled animatable 3D head avatars that are rendered under arbitrary viewpoints with impressive photorealism. Today, such photoreal avatars are seen as a key component in emerging applications in telepresence, extended reality, and entertainment. Building a photoreal avatar requires estimating the complex non-rigid motion of different facial components as seen in input video images; due to inaccurate motion estimation, animatable models typically present a loss of fidelity and detail when compared to their non-animatable counterparts, built from an individual facial expression. Also, recent state-of-the-art models are often affected by memory limitations that reduce the number of 3D Gaussians used for modeling, leading to lower detail and quality. To address these problems, we present a new high-detail 3D head avatar model that improves upon the state of the art, largely increasing the number of 3D Gaussians and modeling quality for rendering at 4K resolution. Our high-quality model is reconstructed from multiview input video and builds on top of a mesh-based 3D morphable model, which provides a coarse deformation layer for the head. Photoreal appearance is modelled by 3D Gaussians embedded within the continuous UVD tangent space of this mesh, allowing for more effective densification where most needed. Additionally, these Gaussians are warped by a novel UVD deformation field to capture subtle, localized motion. Our key contribution is the novel deformable Gaussian encoding and overall fitting procedure that allows our head model to preserve appearance detail, while capturing facial motion and other transient high-frequency features such as skin wrinkling.

We introduce ROGR, a novel approach that reconstructs a relightable 3D model of an object captured from multiple views, driven by a generative relighting model that simulates the effects of placing the object under novel environment illuminations. Our method samples the appearance of the object under multiple lighting environments, creating a dataset that is used to train a lighting-conditioned Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) that outputs the object's appearance under any input environmental lighting. The lighting-conditioned NeRF uses a novel dual-branch architecture to encode the general lighting effects and specularities separately. The optimized lighting-conditioned NeRF enables efficient feed-forward relighting under arbitrary environment maps without requiring per-illumination optimization or light transport simulation. We evaluate our approach on the established TensoIR and Stanford-ORB datasets, where it improves upon the state-of-the-art on most metrics, and showcase our approach on real-world object captures.

We present Relightable Holoported Characters (RHC), a novel person-specific method for free-view rendering and relighting of full-body and highly dynamic humans solely observed from sparse-view RGB videos at inference. In contrast to classical one-light-at-a-time (OLAT)-based human relighting, our transformer-based RelightNet predicts relit appearance within a single network pass, avoiding costly OLAT-basis capture and generation. For training such a model, we introduce a new capture strategy and dataset recorded in a multi-view lightstage, where we alternate frames lit by random environment maps with uniformly lit tracking frames, simultaneously enabling accurate motion tracking and diverse illumination as well as dynamics coverage. Inspired by the rendering equation, we derive physics-informed features that encode geometry, albedo, shading, and the virtual camera view from a coarse human mesh proxy and the input views. Our RelightNet then takes these features as input and cross-attends them with a novel lighting condition, and regresses the relit appearance in the form of texel-aligned 3D Gaussian splats attached to the coarse mesh proxy. Consequently, our RelightNet implicitly learns to efficiently compute the rendering equation for novel lighting conditions within a single feed-forward pass. Experiments demonstrate our method's superior visual fidelity and lighting reproduction compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/RHC/

We present SynShot, a novel method for the few-shot inversion of a drivable head avatar based on a synthetic prior. We tackle three major challenges. First, training a controllable 3D generative network requires a large number of diverse sequences, for which pairs of images and high-quality tracked meshes are not always available. Second, the use of real data is strictly regulated (e.g., under the General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates frequent deletion of models and data to accommodate a situation when a participant's consent is withdrawn). Synthetic data, free from these constraints, is an appealing alternative. Third, state-of-the-art monocular avatar models struggle to generalize to new views and expressions, lacking a strong prior and often overfitting to a specific viewpoint distribution. Inspired by machine learning models trained solely on synthetic data, we propose a method that learns a prior model from a large dataset of synthetic heads with diverse identities, expressions, and viewpoints. With few input images, SynShot fine-tunes the pretrained synthetic prior to bridge the domain gap, modeling a photorealistic head avatar that generalizes to novel expressions and viewpoints. We model the head avatar using 3D Gaussian splatting and a convolutional encoder-decoder that outputs Gaussian parameters in UV texture space. To account for the different modeling complexities over parts of the head (e.g., skin vs hair), we embed the prior with explicit control for upsampling the number of per-part primitives. Compared to SOTA monocular and GAN-based methods, SynShot significantly improves novel view and expression synthesis.

We introduce a novel representation for efficient classical rendering of photorealistic 3D face avatars. Leveraging recent advances in radiance fields anchored to parametric face models, our approach achieves controllable volumetric rendering of complex facial features, including hair, skin, and eyes. At enrollment time, we learn a set of radiance manifolds in 3D space to extract an explicit layered mesh, along with appearance and warp textures. During deployment, this allows us to control and animate the face through simple linear blending and alpha compositing of textures over a static mesh. This explicit representation also enables the generated avatar to be efficiently streamed online and then rendered using classical mesh and shader-based rendering on legacy graphics platforms, eliminating the need for any custom engineering or integration.

Existing UV mapping algorithms are designed to operate on well-behaved meshes, instead of the geometry representations produced by state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and generation techniques. As such, applying these methods to the volume densities recovered by neural radiance fields and related techniques (or meshes triangulated from such fields) results in texture atlases that are too fragmented to be useful for tasks such as view synthesis or appearance editing. We present a UV mapping method designed to operate on geometry produced by 3D reconstruction and generation techniques. Instead of computing a mapping defined on a mesh's vertices, our method Nuvo uses a neural field to represent a continuous UV mapping, and optimizes it to be a valid and well-behaved mapping for just the set of visible points, i.e. only points that affect the scene's appearance. We show that our model is robust to the challenges posed by ill-behaved geometry, and that it produces editable UV mappings that can represent detailed appearance.