We present NBAvatar - a method for realistic rendering of head avatars handling non-rigid deformations caused by hand-face interaction. To this end, we introduce a novel hybrid implicit-explicit representation for animated avatars by combining the training of explicit oriented planar primitives with implicit neural rendering. Such a combination of representations in the end-to-end pipeline enables NBAvatar to handle temporally and pose-consistent geometry, along with fine-grained appearance details provided by the neural rendering technique. To enable joint optimization of different representations we propose a geometry-aware training scheme that allows our hybrid representation to surpass existing approaches in terms of novel-view and novel-pose rendering quality. Specifically, NBAvatar achieves up to 53% LPIPS reduction compared to Gaussian-based avatar methods, while also improving PSNR and SSIM, and achieves higher structural similarity compared to the state-of-the-art hand-face interaction method InteractAvatar.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Novel view synthesis. We present the method for photo-realistic novel-view rendering of non-rigid hand-face interaction scenarios for human avatars. a) Our method achieves photo-realistic rendering quality for novel views and poses, surpassing state-of-the-art InteractAvatar [ 8 ] results. b) The method enables cross-actor enactment by transferring hand and face poses across different subjects.
Figure 2: Method description. a) For multi-view input video, we fit FLAME [ 29 ] and MANO [ 42 ] parametric models and reconstruct coarse face deformation with position-based dynamics (PBD) [ 34 ] . b) Then, for each polygon in the mesh, we anchor Neural Billboards by computing its orientation as offsets relative to the polygon. We rasterize Neural Billboards into a 6-channel image and a corresponding alpha map. c) Finally, we transform this rasterization to RGB with the U-Net renderer R while regularizing the alpha map to fit the ground truth silhouette.
Figure 3: Neural billboards rasterization. a) We initialize the alpha texture Tiα with a Gaussian distribution, and fill neural texture TiNT with corresponding spectral coordinates on the mesh surface. During training, we optimize both textures with gradients from the rasterizer. b) We rasterize screen point x by accumulating corresponding texture values along the ray. The resulting IfNB transforms to RGB with a trainable renderer R .
Novel view
Self-enact
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
SplattingAvatar [ 46 ]
24.67
0.9313
0.0942
24.83
0.9399
0.0847
GaussianAvatar [ 40 ]
24.95
0.9397
0.0756
25.14
0.9479
0.0663
Ours
26.08
0.9484
0.0439
25.25
0.9496
0.0479
Ours (MSE)
26.55
0.9517
0.0518
25.73
0.9523
0.0543
Table 1: Quantitative metrics. We report metrics for novel views and self-enactment (novel pose) rendering on the Decaf [ 47 ] dataset.
Novel view
Self-enact
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
InteractAvatar
29.85
0.9335
0.0338
28.17
0.9356
0.0396
Ours
26.08
0.9484
0.0439
25.25
0.9496
0.0479
Ours (MSE)
26.55
0.9517
0.0518
25.73
0.9523
0.0543
Table 2: Comparison with the metrics reported in the InteractAvatar [ 8 ] paper. We reproduced the evaluation pipeline for our method as closely as possible, and InteractAvatar results are taken directly from the original paper.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison with InteractAvatar [ 8 ] . NBAvatar produces sharper details and more realistic hand-face deformations with fewer artifacts. InteractAvatar exhibits characteristic 3DGS artifacts including blurry facial textures and protruding Gaussians along the avatar boundary.
Figure 5: Qualitative comparison on novel views. We compare our method with SplattingAvatar [ 46 ] and GaussianAvatars [ 40 ] on the Decaf [ 47 ] dataset. NBAvatar produces sharp, high-fidelity reconstructions of non-rigid facial deformations and dynamic hand appearance, accurately capturing facial details.
Figure 6: Novel-pose synthesis (self-reenactment). We compare our method with SplattingAvatar [ 46 ] and GaussianAvatars [ 40 ] on held-out poses from the Decaf [ 47 ] dataset. NBAvatar generalizes to unseen hand-face interaction poses, faithfully reproducing contact-induced deformations and appearance changes.
Configuration
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
w/o LNB
25.41
0.9461
0.0453
w/o normals
25.86
0.9474
0.0451
w/o poses
25.12
0.9425
0.0509
w/o DNR
24.34
0.9333
0.0655
Full Method
26.08
0.9484
0.0439
Table 3: Ablation study on novel view synthesis for Decaf dataset.
Figure 7: Ablation study. We demonstrate renders and billboards’ masks for one of the Decaf subjects with ablated key components of the proposed algorithm.
Figure 8: Position-based dynamics ablation. We report examples of rendering all methods under novel poses with PBD and without.
w/ PBD
w/o PBD
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
SplattingAvatar
24.67
0.9313
0.0942
24.63
0.9312
0.0943
GaussianAvatar
24.95
0.9397
0.0756
24.86
0.9394
0.0755
Ours
26.08
0.9484
0.0439
25.84
0.9475
0.0455
Table 4: Position-based dynamics ablation for all methods under novel views.
Subject
Training Cameras
Evaluation Cameras
S1
110, 100, 108, 084, 111, 121, 122
102
S2
122, 110, 102, 100, 084, 111, 121
108
S3
121, 108, 122, 110, 102, 111, 084
100
S4
108, 122, 110, 102, 100, 084, 121
111
Table 5: Cameras setup. We used the following train-test camera split for the Decaf dataset for each subject.
Stage
Speed (ms) ↓
FPS ↑
Rasterization - RGB
1.1
880
Rasterization - NT
1.3
750
Neural Rendering - fp32
5.52
181
Neural Rendering - fp16
2.97
336
Total (NT; fp16)
4.13
242
Table 6: Inference speed evaluation. We report inference speed and corresponding FPS for different stages of the rendering pipeline. We additionally investigate the inference speed of rasterization with RGB and Neural Textures (NT).
S1
S2
S3
S4
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
Splatt. Av. [ 46 ]
25.17
0.9363
0.0892
25.83
0.9501
0.0689
24.45
0.9309
0.0938
23.24
0.9080
0.1251
Gauss. Av. [ 40 ]
25.31
0.9436
0.0691
26.55
0.9605
0.0533
24.55
0.9390
0.0763
23.40
0.9159
0.1040
Ours
26.04
0.9490
0.0401
28.36
0.9707
0.0247
25.37
0.9506
0.0457
24.55
0.9234
0.0651
Ours (MSE)
26.60
0.9525
0.0482
28.82
0.9721
0.0256
25.66
0.9538
0.0560
25.11
0.9286
0.0774
Table 7: Novel-view metrics per person. We report novel-view quantitative objective metrics separately for each person used in the evaluation on the Decaf dataset.
S1
S2
S3
S4
Method
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
Splatt. Av. [ 46 ]
25.59
0.9443
0.0834
23.61
0.9313
0.0939
25.68
0.9490
0.0730
24.42
0.9353
0.0886
Gauss. Av. [ 40 ]
26.36
0.9556
0.0614
23.68
0.9357
0.0766
25.85
0.9556
0.0570
24.67
0.9447
0.0703
Ours
27.12
0.9611
0.0324
21.99
0.9287
0.0782
26.35
0.9591
0.0370
25.56
0.9498
0.0443
Ours (MSE)
27.87
0.9646
0.0416
22.10
0.9311
0.0751
26.81
0.9608
0.0454
26.13
0.9527
0.0552
Table 8: Self-enact metrics per person. We report novel-pose quantitative objective metrics separately for each person used in the evaluation on the Decaf dataset.
Figure 9: Qualitative comparison on novel views for additional subjects. We compare our method with SplattingAvatar [ 46 ] and GaussianAvatars [ 40 ] on the Decaf [ 47 ] dataset. Our NBAvatar produces sharp, high-fidelity reconstructions of non-rigid facial deformations and dynamic hand appearance, accurately capturing facial details.
Figure 10: Novel-pose synthesis for additional subjects. We compare our method with SplattingAvatar [ 46 ] and GaussianAvatars [ 40 ] on held-out poses from the Decaf [ 47 ] dataset. Our NBAvatar generalizes to unseen hand-face interaction poses, faithfully reproducing contact-induced deformations and appearance changes.
Figure 11: Cross-reenactment for different subjects. We report more examples of cross-reenactment when we drive one actor with the poses of another.
Channels
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
FPS ↑
3
27.54
0.9671
0.0286
153
6
28.12
0.9691
0.0259
149
12
27.89
0.9686
0.0276
144
24
28.22
0.9701
0.0270
27
Table 9: Number of channels. We analyzed the metrics and inference speed for Subject 2 from the Decaf dataset, and selected the optimal number of channels for Neural Textures.
Avatar reconstruction has traditionally relied on per-subject optimization that requires hours of computation or on expensive preprocessing that limits scalability. We introduce FFAvatar, a generalizable feed-forward framework that reconstructs high-quality, animatable 3D Gaussian head avatars from few-shot unposed portrait images in seconds. FFAvatar fuses information from multiple source images into a unified canonical Gaussian representation through Multi-View Query-Former, which is animated via FLAME parameters predicted end-to-end directly from pixels, eliminating the overhead of offline FLAME extraction. We further propose a three-stage training curriculum that achieves both broad generalization and high-fidelity reconstruction: (i) scalable pretraining on extensive monocular video data with over 1M identities to learn strong generalizable priors; (ii) multi-view fine-tuning on a small but high-quality dataset of 360-degree captures to enhance geometric fidelity and extreme-view awareness; and (iii) optional personalization that adapts to specific identities for maximum fidelity within 500 optimization steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FFAvatar sets a new standard for identity preservation, geometric consistency, and animation fidelity. On the NeRSemble benchmark, it outperforms the state-of-the-art LAM by a substantial 5.5 PSNR gain. Furthermore, FFAvatar enables real-time deployment, reconstructing avatars in 2 seconds without personalization and 10 seconds with personalization, while supporting 49 FPS animation on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU.
Thuan Hoang Nguyen, Jiahao Luo, Yinyu Nie +3
Snap Inc. · MBZUAI · University of California, Santa Cruz
3D human avatars have shown impressive visual fidelity driven by pose-conditioned models, yet they still lack the physical ability required for interactions with each other and environments. Although recent studies have made various attempts to incorporate physical characteristics into 3D avatars, they only exhibit limited physical deformations, often leading to constrained interaction behaviors. To resolve this issue, we present PIAvatar, a framework to simultaneously enable physically aware interactions between avatar-avatar and avatar-environment, and a non-rigid deformable human body simulation. In this work, our key insight is to decouple kinematic velocity from deformation gradient. When external forces act on avatars, the kinematic velocity induces stress which hinders the avatar's ability to achieve a desired pose. In addition, we integrate a skeletal framework within the avatar. It allows estimating its poses and real-time tracking in a closed form, even during non-rigid physical interactions. Our approach is implemented within a conventional Material Point Method framework to ensure physically consistent dynamics. We lastly evaluate the method on both human-object and human-human interaction scenarios to assess its behavior under diverse interaction settings.
Existing full-body Gaussian avatar methods primarily optimize global reconstruction quality and often fail to preserve fine-grained facial geometry and expression details. This challenge arises from limited facial representational capacity that causes difficulties in modeling high-frequency pose-dependent deformations. To address this, we propose F3G-Avatar, a full-body, face-aware avatar synthesis method that reconstructs animatable human representations from multi-view RGB video and regressed pose/shape parameters. Starting from a clothed Momentum Human Rig (MHR) template, front/back positional maps are rendered and decoded into 3D Gaussians through a two-branch architecture: a body branch that captures pose-dependent non-rigid deformations and a face-focused deformation branch that refines head geometry and appearance. The predicted Gaussians are fused, posed with linear blend skinning (LBS), and rendered with differentiable Gaussian splatting. Training combines reconstruction and perceptual objectives with a face-specific adversarial loss to enhance realism in close-up views. Experiments demonstrate strong rendering quality, with face-view performance reaching PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS of 26.243/0.964/0.084 on the AvatarReX dataset. Ablations further highlight contributions of the MHR template and the face-focused deformation. F3G-Avatar provides a practical, high-quality pipeline for realistic, animatable full-body avatar synthesis.
Willem Menu, Erkut Akdag, Pedro Quesado +2
AIMS Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology