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URAvatar: Universal Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars (arxiv.org)
2 points by sandwichsphinx on Nov 4, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It turns a phone scan into a head avatar you can animate and light in any environment in real time. Training on hundreds of people under controllable lights taught it how light bounces off faces, and it beat approaches that guess surface shine.

Abstract

We present a new approach to creating photorealistic and relightable head avatars from a phone scan with unknown illumination. The reconstructed avatars can be animated and relit in real time with the global illumination of diverse environments. Unlike existing approaches that estimate parametric reflectance parameters via inverse rendering, our approach directly models learnable radiance transfer that incorporates global light transport in an efficient manner for real-time rendering. However, learning such a complex light transport that can generalize across identities is non-trivial. A phone scan in a single environment lacks sufficient information to infer how the head would appear in general environments. To address this, we build a universal relightable avatar model represented by 3D Gaussians. We train on hundreds of high-quality multi-view human scans with controllable point lights. High-resolution geometric guidance further enhances the reconstruction accuracy and generalization. Once trained, we finetune the pretrained model on a phone scan using inverse rendering to obtain a personalized relightable avatar. Our experiments establish the efficacy of our design, outperforming existing approaches while retaining real-time rendering capability.

Junxuan Li, Chen Cao, Gabriel Schwartz, Rawal Khirodkar, Christian Richardt, Tomas Simon, Yaser Sheikh, Shunsuke Saito
arXiv:2410.24223 · cs.CV, cs.GR · submitted Oct 31, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · SIGGRAPH Asia 2024. Website: https://junxuan-li.github.io/urgca-website/

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