One-shot Compositional 3D Head Avatars with Deformable Hair
Authors: Yuan Sun, Xuan Wang, WeiLi Zhang, Wenxuan Zhang, Yu Guo, Fei Wang
Organizations: Xi’an Jiaotong University, China
Abstract
We propose a compositional method for constructing a complete 3D head avatar from a single image. Prior one-shot holistic approaches frequently fail to produce realistic hair dynamics during animation, largely due to inadequate decoupling of hair from the facial region, resulting in entangled geometry and unnatural deformations. Our method explicitly decouples hair from the face, modeling these components using distinct deformation paradigms while integrating them into a unified rendering pipeline. Furthermore, by leveraging image-to-3D lifting techniques, we preserve fine-grained textures from the input image to the greatest extent possible, effectively mitigating the common issue of high-frequency information loss in generalized models. Specifically, given a frontal portrait image, we first perform hair removal to obtain a bald image. Both the original image and the bald image are then lifted to dense, detail-rich 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representations. For the bald 3DGS, we rig it to a FLAME mesh via non-rigid registration with a prior model, enabling natural deformation that follows the mesh triangles during animation. For the hair component, we employ semantic label supervision combined with a boundary-aware reassignment strategy to extract a clean and isolated set of hair Gaussians. To control hair deformation, we introduce a cage structure that supports Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) simulation, allowing realistic and physically plausible transformations of the hair Gaussian primitives under head motion, gravity, and inertial effects. Striking qualitative results, including dynamic animations under diverse head motions, gravity effects, and expressions, showcase substantially more realistic hair behavior alongside faithfully preserved facial details, outperforming state-of-the-art one-shot methods in perceptual realism.
We present DynHair, a novel method for tracking and modeling dynamic hair for human head avatars. From video input, we reconstruct a dynamic head avatar with an explicit strand-based hair representation using structured 3D Gaussian Splatting. In contrast to the face region of human head avatars, which can be modeled with 3D Gaussians that are attached or generated with respect to some expressive 3D head model, hair is particularly challenging as it exhibits dynamic motion effects. Therefore, we present a novel method that models the dynamic deformations of the hair strands using a temporal network that is conditioned on angular velocity and acceleration of the head, as well as relative gravity. Specifically, an LSTM encodes the motion history and modulates per-point strand features via FiLM conditioning which further used by MLP to produce physically plausible displacements to canonical hairstyle. We jointly optimize this motion and appearance representation of the hair, with a 3DGS-based representation of the face-region, via differentiable Gaussian splatting with photometric, geometric, and physics-based supervision. As a result of our method, we retrieve hair tracking of the training video data and an animatable head avatar with controllable hair dynamics. In our experiments, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in terms of hair dynamics, temporal consistency, and generalization across subjects.
We introduce MeshLAM, a feed-forward framework for one-shot animatable mesh head reconstruction that generates high-fidelity, animatable 3D head avatars from a single image. Unlike previous work that relies on time-consuming test-time optimization or extensive multi-view data, our method produces complete mesh representations with inherent animatability from a single image in a single forward pass. Our approach employs a dual shape and texture map architecture that simultaneously processes mesh vertices and texture map with extracted image features from a shared transformer backbone, allowing for coherent shape carving and appearance modeling. To prevent mesh collapse and ensure topological integrity during feed-forward deformation, we propose an iterative GRU-based decoding mechanism with progressive geometry deformation and texture refinement, coupled with a novel reprojection-based texture guidance mechanism that anchors appearance learning to the input image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in reconstruction quality, animation capability, and computational efficiency. Project page at https://meshlam.github.io.
Building one-shot 3D animatable head avatars is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods generally collapse under large camera pose variations, compromising the realism of 3D avatars. In this work, we propose a new framework to tackle the novel setting of one-shot 3D full-head animatable avatar reconstruction in a single forward pass via inpainted UV-space Gaussian modeling, enabling 360∘ rendering views and real-time animation. To facilitate efficient animation control, we model 3D head avatars with Gaussian primitives embedded on the surface of a parametric face model within the UV space, and project the input image features to the UV space, resulting in incomplete local UV feature maps. To inpaint the missing regions, we obtain knowledge of full-head geometry and textures from rich 3D full-head priors within a pretrained 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for global full-head feature extraction and multi-view supervision. Specifically, to enhance the fidelity of 3D reconstruction during inpainting, we take advantage of the symmetric nature of the UV space and human faces to fuse incomplete yet detailed local UV feature maps with the extracted global full-head textures, resulting in inpainted UV Gaussian attribute maps for avatar modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is the first to achieve high-quality 3D full-head animatable avatar modeling, significantly improving side and back views while outperforming state-of-the-art animation approaches, thereby improving the realism of 3D animatable avatars.