Digitizing humans and synthesizing photorealistic avatars with explicit 3D pose and camera controls are central to VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing skinning-based workflows require laborious manual rigging or template-based fittings, while neural volumetric methods rely on canonical templates and re-optimization for each unseen pose. We present PoseCraft, a diffusion framework built around tokenized 3D interface: instead of relying only on rasterized geometry as 2D control images, we encode sparse 3D landmarks and camera extrinsics as discrete conditioning tokens and inject them into diffusion via cross-attention. Our approach preserves 3D semantics by avoiding 2D re-projection ambiguity under large pose and viewpoint changes, and produces photorealistic imagery that faithfully captures identity and appearance. To train and evaluate at scale, we also implement GenHumanRF, a data generation workflow that renders diverse supervision from volumetric reconstructions. Our experiments show that PoseCraft achieves significant perceptual quality improvement over diffusion-centric methods, and attains better or comparable metrics to latest volumetric rendering SOTA while better preserving fabric and hair details.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: PoseCraft uses tokenized 3D landmarks and camera parameters to synthesize photorealistic humans. This explicit 3D control delivers sharp silhouettes, preserves high-frequency details, and ensures structural coherence across novel viewpoints.
Figure 2: Pipeline overview of (A) RigCraft and (B, C) PoseCraft. (A) RigCraft performs multi-view fusion to generate temporally stable 3D landmarks from 2D poses. (B) During training, PoseCraft learns to denoise latent representations conditioned on tokenized 3D landmarks and camera parameters. (C) At inference, PoseCraft synthesizes a photorealistic image from a target 3D pose and camera view.
Figure 3: PoseCraft Architecture. We guide a latent diffusion UNet with two conditioning streams. First, a 3D Control Tokenizer converts camera extrinsics and 3D body landmarks into discrete tokens, which are injected via cross-attention for explicit 3D control. Second, a 2D skeleton projection is concatenated with the noisy latent input to provide direct spatial guidance.
Actor
Seq.
Gender
Clothing
Train
Test
Views
01
1
F
Loose
0–2000
2000–2200
100
2
0–2200
–
100
02
1
M
Tight
0–1900
1900–2100
100
2
0–2400
–
100
06
1
F
Tight
0–2100
2100–2300
100
2
0–2400
–
100
Table 1: Train/test split for three selected ActorsHQ [ 12 ] subjects. For each actor and sequence, we list gender, clothing style, training-frame and held-out test-frame ranges, and the number of virtual camera views per frame. We specifically choose Actor 01 (female, loose clothing), Actor 02 (male, tight clothing), and Actor 06 (female, tight clothing) to cover both genders and garment variety for comprehensive validation coverage.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison on the GenHumanRF test split [ 12 ] . The proposed PoseCraft method largely outperforms the image-based CFLD [ 24 ] , CHAMP [ 53 ] , T2I-Adapter [ 30 ] and ControlNet [ 47 ] , and compare better or comparatively to the volumetric rendering SOTA Animatable Gaussian [ 19 ] .
Method
Actor01
Actor02
Actor06
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
CFLD [ 24 ]
16.01
0.8035
0.2508
120.49
15.91
0.7843
0.2823
116.08
16.15
0.8149
0.2270
101.85
AnimateAnyone [ 11 ]
19.70
0.8438
0.1508
70.27
20.47
0.8398
0.1591
59.55
18.13
0.8299
0.1630
104.82
CHAMP [ 53 ]
20.75
0.8536
0.1270
53.67
21.12
0.8559
0.1352
42.00
19.04
0.8601
0.1418
66.94
T2I-Adapter [ 30 ]
23.01
0.9042
0.1053
41.89
25.16
0.9217
0.0823
38.32
23.99
0.9268
0.0798
40.34
ControlNet [ 47 ]
26.93
0.6737
0.0489
34.72
23.02
0.2080
0.0944
27.65
26.66
0.4622
0.0494
29.08
Table 2: Quantitative comparison of methods on our GenHumanRF train/test split. Our PoseCraft method largely outperforms diffusion-based CFLD [ 24 ] , AnimateAnyone [ 11 ] , CHAMP [ 53 ] , T2I-Adapter [ 30 ] , ControlNet [ 47 ] , and compares better or competitively to best volumetric rendering SOTA Animatable Gaussians [ 19 ] . ( ↑ higher is better, ↓ lower is better, boldface indicates best result.)
Camera & Skeleton
Test
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
Plucker & OP-map
view
26.28
0.9505
0.0385
20.83
frame
29.05
0.9620
0.0278
30.78
all
26.23
0.9518
0.0398
22.60
Plucker & RC-map
view
27.16
0.9562
0.0359
22.32
frame
30.32
0.9679
0.0247
31.87
all
27.49
0.9580
0.0360
23.59
Table 3: Camera encoding ablation . Spherical Harmonics (SH) for camera rotation achieves better metrics than Plucker Ray with either RigCraft skeleton or OpenPose skeleton.
Token Embedding
Test
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
No MLP
view
27.50
0.9500
0.0386
21.94
frame
29.53
0.9627
0.0255
31.08
all
28.10
0.9532
0.0376
23.57
Share MLP
view
28.09
0.9534
0.0362
23.39
frame
29.27
0.9616
0.0264
31.88
all
28.37
0.9548
0.0360
24.33
Table 4: 3D Control Tokenizer ablation. Our Per-token MLP treats each 3D information token independently to elevate model’s 3D awareness, outperforming No MLP and Shared MLP ablations.
Control Method
Test
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FID ↓
3D-CT only
view
24.59
0.9526
0.05883
28.25
frame
28.26
0.9574
0.02858
32.19
all
25.45
0.9471
0.0553
28.32
OP-Map only
view
26.73
0.9443
0.0427
24.04
frame
28.56
0.9570
0.0302
34.53
all
26.95
0.9456
0.0433
25.05
Table 5: Control method ablation. Our RigCraft (RC) skeleton together with 3D Control Tokenizer (3D-CT) architecture outperforms all other control combinations, including 3D-CT only ; OP(OpenPose)-map only ; OP-Map & 3D-CT ; and RC-Map only .
Figure 5: Qualitative visualization of the RigCraft 3D landmark estimation and refinement. From top to bottom: (1) noisy 3D landmarks from re-projected 2D OpenPose detections; (2) landmarks after multi-view triangulation; and (3) the final, temporally coherent RigCraft outputs after smoothing.
We present GenLCA, a diffusion-based generative model for generating and editing photorealistic full-body avatars from text and image inputs. The generated avatars are faithful to the inputs, while supporting high-fidelity facial and full-body animations. The core idea is a novel paradigm that enables training a full-body 3D diffusion model from partially observable 2D data, allowing the training dataset to scale to millions of real-world videos. This scalability contributes to the superior photorealism and generalizability of GenLCA. Specifically, we scale up the dataset by repurposing a pretrained feed-forward avatar reconstruction model as an animatable 3D tokenizer, which encodes unstructured video frames into structured 3D tokens. However, most real-world videos only provide partial observations of body parts, resulting in excessive blurring or transparency artifacts in the 3D tokens. To address this, we propose a novel visibility-aware diffusion training strategy that replaces invalid regions with learnable tokens and computes losses only over valid regions. We then train a flow-based diffusion model on the token dataset, inherently maintaining the photorealism and animatability provided by the pretrained avatar reconstruction model. Our approach effectively enables the use of large-scale real-world video data to train a diffusion model natively in 3D. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through diverse and high-fidelity generation and editing results, outperforming existing solutions by a large margin. The project page is available at https://onethousandwu.com/GenLCA-Page.
Yiqian Wu, Rawal Khirodkar, Egor Zakharov +6
State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China
Acquiring labeled datasets for 3D human mesh estimation is challenging due to depth ambiguities and the inherent difficulty of annotating 3D geometry from monocular images. Existing datasets are either real, with manually annotated 3D geometry and limited scale, or synthetic, rendered from 3D engines that provide precise labels but suffer from limited photorealism, low diversity, and high production costs. In this work, we explore a third path: generated data. We introduce PoseDreamer, a novel pipeline that leverages diffusion models to generate large-scale synthetic datasets with 3D mesh annotations. Our approach combines controllable image generation with Direct Preference Optimization for control alignment, curriculum-based hard sample mining, and multi-stage quality filtering. Together, these components naturally maintain correspondence between 3D labels and generated images, while prioritizing challenging samples to maximize dataset utility. Using PoseDreamer, we generate more than 500,000 high-quality synthetic samples, achieving a 76% improvement in image-quality metrics compared to rendering-based datasets. Models trained on PoseDreamer achieve performance comparable to or superior to those trained on real-world and traditional synthetic datasets. In addition, combining PoseDreamer with synthetic datasets results in better performance than combining real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating the complementary nature of our dataset. We will release the full dataset and generation code.
The Podium Institute for Sports Medicine and Technology University of Oxford Oxford, UK · Visual Geometry Group University of Oxford Oxford, UK · Ukrainian Catholic University Lviv, Ukraine
Single-image 3D human reconstruction often suffers from over-smoothed textures and geometric inconsistencies. While diffusion models improve generative quality, their reliance on multi-view synthesis prior to 3D reconstruction is computationally expensive and prone to view inconsistency. We propose DiGS-Avatar, which reformulates this task as an efficient, diffusion-based UV-latent completion task, ensuring 3D consistency by design. To capture accurate spatial structure, we introduce a teacher-student framework where a multi-view teacher provides geometrically aligned pseudo-ground-truth latents to supervise a single-view diffusion student. Treating this inferred latent as a robust structural skeleton, our method injects high-level semantic features to accurately recover fine textural details without disrupting spatial integrity. The refined representation is then decoded into 3D Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiGS-Avatar achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive visual fidelity and zero-shot generalization, while reconstructing a fully animatable 3D avatar in just 0.71 seconds. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/DiGS-Avatar.
Jiakun Li, Li Fang, Hao Zhu +4
Key Laboratory of Media Audio and Video (Communication University of China), Ministry of Education, Beijing 100024, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China