cs.CVMar 17, 2026

SMAL-pets: SMAL Based Avatars of Pets from Single Image

Authors: Piotr Borycki, Joanna Waczyńska, Yizhe Zhu, Yongqiang Gao, Przemysław Spurek

Organizations: Jagiellonian University · Huawei

Abstract

Creating high-fidelity, animatable 3D dog avatars remains a formidable challenge in computer vision. Unlike human digital doubles, animal reconstruction faces a critical shortage of large-scale, annotated datasets for specialized applications. Furthermore, the immense morphological diversity across species, breeds, and crosses, which varies significantly in size, proportions, and features, complicates the generalization of existing models. Current reconstruction methods often struggle to capture realistic fur textures. Additionally, ensuring these avatars are fully editable and capable of performing complex, naturalistic movements typically necessitates labor-intensive manual mesh manipulation and expert rigging. This paper introduces SMAL-pets, a comprehensive framework that generates high-quality, editable animal avatars from a single input image. Our approach bridges the gap between reconstruction and generative modeling by leveraging a hybrid architecture. Our method integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting with the SMAL parametric model to provide a representation that is both visually high-fidelity and anatomically grounded. We introduce a multimodal editing suite that enables users to refine the avatar's appearance and execute complex animations through direct textual prompts. By allowing users to control both the aesthetic and behavioral aspects of the model via natural language, SMAL-pets provides a flexible, robust tool for animation and virtual reality.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Sep 8, 2026

AnimalLift: Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from a Single Image by Learning Canonical Shape, Texture, and Fur Maps

Reconstructing a fully animatable 3D animal from a single image remains challenging because animation-ready assets require not only plausible geometry, but also a unified topology, editable appearance, and fur representations compatible with deformation and simulation. Existing image-to-3D approaches often rely on implicit or loosely structured representations that are difficult to rig or edit, while parametric animal models support animation but cannot capture detailed texture and fur appearance. We present AnimalLift, a framework for reconstructing structured, animation-compatible 3D animal assets with explicit fur from a single image. Our method lifts an input image into a shared canonical space with a consistent topology and UV parameterization across the dataset, enabling joint prediction of canonical geometry, texture, and fur in a unified feed-forward architecture. A key component of our representation is a UV-aligned fur map that encodes strand geometry in a surface-aligned canonical domain, allowing explicit fur reconstruction compatible with mesh deformation and fur simulation. To train the model, we introduce a procedural data generation pipeline that provides large-scale supervision with aligned geometry, texture, and fur across diverse animal species and appearances. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong reconstruction quality and generalization across animal categories. Beyond reconstruction, our structured representation directly supports downstream applications including animation, pose transfer, fur editing, and simulation-compatible rendering.
Jul 1, 2026

CORGI: Consistency-Aware 3D Dog Reconstruction from a Single Image in the Wild

Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D models of highly articulated animals, such as dogs, from a single in-the-wild image remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we introduce CORGI, a novel framework for consistency-aware 3D dog reconstruction from a single unconstrained image that completely eliminates the need for 3D supervision. To overcome generative inconsistencies and the lack of multi-view capture, our pipeline introduces three core components. First, we propose a Canonical-Driven Orbital Generation (CDOG) strategy, utilizing specialized Canonical and Orbit LoRAs to normalize arbitrary input poses and synthesize reliable 360-degree video observations. Second, we design a Consistency-aware Deformable 3DGS (CA-3DGS) module that anchors on a D-SMAL prior, explicitly modeling per-view generative errors through dedicated neural deformation fields to learn accurate vertex-level displacements. Finally, to eliminate structural distortions and recover high-frequency details, we introduce a self-supervised Deformation-Conditioned Generative Repair (DCGR) module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORGI achieves state-of-the-art performance, generalizing seamlessly across diverse dog breeds to produce geometrically accurate, visually coherent, and fully animatable 3D assets ready for downstream applications.
Mar 8, 2026

DogWeave: High-Fidelity 3D Canine Reconstruction from a Single Image via Normal Fusion and Conditional Inpainting

Monocular 3D animal reconstruction is challenging due to complex articulation, self-occlusion, and fine-scale details such as fur. Existing methods often produce distorted geometry and inconsistent textures due to the lack of articulated 3D supervision and limited availability of back-view images in 2D datasets, which makes reconstructing unobserved regions particularly difficult. To address these limitations, we propose DogWeave, a model-based framework for reconstructing high-fidelity 3D canine models from a single RGB image. DogWeave improves geometry by refining a coarsely-initiated parametric mesh into a detailed SDF representation through multi-view normal field optimization using diffusion-enhanced normals. It then generates view-consistent textures through conditional partial inpainting guided by structure and style cues, enabling realistic reconstruction of unobserved regions. Using only about 7,000 dog images processed via our 2D pipeline for training, DogWeave produces complete, realistic 3D models and outperforms state-of-the-art single image to 3d reconstruction methods in both shape accuracy and texture realism for canines.