For full-body avatars, modeling surface dynamics is crucial for overcoming the uncanny valley and achieving perceptual realism. Person-agnostic methods recover static 3D avatars from monocular images, videos, or text prompts, but their skeleton-driven animations lack realistic surface dynamics such as clothing wrinkles.
The paper introduces GALA, a distillation technique that replaces costly neural decoding in 3D Gaussian avatars with a shallow MLP predicting blendshape coefficients, enabling real‑time animation. By constructing a basis via block‑local PCA under a rendering‑aware metric, GALA achieves high fidelity while reducing memory usage. Experiments on three avatar models show up to three orders of magnitude lower CPU cost and frame rates up to 60fps on mobile devices.
By Ramazan Fazylov, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev
arXiv:2606. 31981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Creating photorealistic, animatable 3D human avatars from monocular images still largely depends on Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) and parametric body models, which constrain expressivity and often introduce artifacts due to imperfect fitting.
By Peng Li, Rawal Khirodkar, Junxuan Li, Yuan Dong, Chen Cao, Yuan Liu, Wenhan Luo, Yike Guo, Shunsuke Saito
arXiv:2606. 30347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present FFAvatar, a Transformer-based 3D Gaussian framework for fast construction of high-quality and animatable 4D head avatars from one or more reference portrait images.
By Jianjiang Yao, Ke Xian, Renxiang Dai, Robert Caiming Qiu
AGORA is a new framework that extends 3D Gaussian Splatting with a generative adversarial network to produce high‑fidelity, animatable 3D head avatars. It introduces a lightweight FLAME‑conditioned deformation branch that predicts per‑Gaussian residuals for identity‑preserving, fine‑grained expression control, and a dual‑discriminator training scheme that enforces expression fidelity. The system achieves real‑time inference at 250 FPS on a single GPU and, for the first time, CPU‑only animatable 3DGS avatar synthesis at ~9 FPS.
By Ramazan Fazylov, Sergey Zagoruyko, Aleksandr Parkin, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev
arXiv:2610.10945v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We present GHARP (Real-time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-scale Reconstruction Prior), a method that animates 3D human heads in real time from a...
By Ali Benlalah, Sepehr Johari, Patricia Vitoria, Armin Kappeler, Artem Sevastopolsky, Alexander Jung, Gabriele Fanelli, Kevin Mader, Manuel Breitenstein, Claudia Pl\"uss, Jan R\"uegg, Simon Biland, Thomas Etterlin, Dmitry Kostiaev, Mathias Deschler, Brian Amberg, Sebastian Martin