Printing the Underdetermined: Materializing Multi-solutionness in Figurative Paintings
Authors: Yutao Ming, Teng Xu, Youjia Wang, Yunyang Liu, Fengmin Yang, Fuqiang Zhao, Jingyi Yu, Hua Yang, +1 more
Abstract
Figurative paintings are often approached as if they depict a single recoverable 3D scene: viewers infer depth and occlusion, and reconstruction pipelines attempt to converge to one stable model. We instead foreground multi-solutionness, the non-uniqueness of 3D configurations compatible with a single painted image, and propose a workflow that keeps this non-uniqueness visible and material. Multi-solutionness arises from two sources: unobserved content, where backsides and occluded volumes admit multiple plausible completions, and observed cues, where perspective, shading, and occlusion still underconstrain geometry. When additional views are synthesized by a video generative model without explicit 3D constraints, small frame-level drifts become inevitable rather than exceptional. Our pipeline samples multiple camera-orbit multi-view video sequences from one painting, reconstructs each sequence with 3D Gaussian Splatting into a point-based Gaussian scene representation where density halos and ghosting expose unresolved degrees of freedom, and fabricates these representations as physical artifacts using DreamPrinting. By treating multiple compatible interpretations as explicit outputs rather than residual error, we provide a computational framework for spatial readings of figurative painting that can be inspected, compared, and discussed in both digital and physical form.
Artists coordinate human pose, illumination, and camera placement to convey narrative and emotion, but existing generative methods typically model these elements independently. We introduce text-to-editable 3D staging, a task that jointly generates human poses, a dominant light, and a camera configuration from an affective description. We construct 11,911 text--staging pairs from 2,328 figurative paintings by reconstructing SMPL bodies, estimating low-frequency illumination, recovering camera parameters, and pairing each scene with ArtEmis descriptions. We train a flow-matching transformer that supports variable numbers of figures and produces multiple staging alternatives for each prompt. On held-out descriptions, the model achieves 32.2% retrieval R@1, compared with 16.6% for CLIP-based nearest-neighbor retrieval, while approximately preserving corpus-level diversity. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating editable, emotionally conditioned 3D staging references from text.
Appreciating multi-figure paintings requires understanding how characters relate through subtle cues like gaze alignment, gesture, and spatial arrangement. We present MIRAGE, an evidence-centric framework designed to scaffold the exploration of these "micro-interactions" in multi-figure artworks. While such cues are essential for deep narrative appreciation, they are often distributed across complex scenes and difficult for viewers to systematically identify. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) frequently fail to provide reliable assistance, offering ungrounded interpretations that lack traceable visual evidence. MIRAGE addresses this by constructing a structured intermediate representation capturing identities, pose cues, and gaze hypotheses. However, the challenge extends beyond extracting these cues to coordinating them during interpretation. Without an explicit mechanism to organize and reconcile relational evidence, models often collapse multiple interaction hypotheses into a single unstable or weakly grounded narrative, even when low-level signals are available. This representation allows users to verify how high-level interpretations are anchored in low-level visual facts. By separating spatial grounding from narrative generation, MIRAGE enables users to inspect and reason about figure-to-figure relationships through a verifiable evidence layer. We evaluate MIRAGE against painting-only VLM baselines using a blind assessment protocol. Results show that MIRAGE significantly improves identity consistency, reduces relational hallucinations, and increases the coverage of subtle interactions. These findings suggest that structured grounding can serve as a critical interaction control layer, providing the necessary scaffolding for a more reliable, transparent, and human-led understanding of complex visual narratives.
Portrait photography is largely decided before the shutter opens: the subject's pose, the camera configuration, and the lighting devices must be coordinated within the surrounding 3D scene. In contrast, most existing computational methods focus on post-production in 2D image space, such as retouching, relighting, or editing images that already exist; pre-capture photographic planning remains largely unexplored. We introduce 3D aesthetic portrait planning, the task of generating human pose, camera, lighting, and exposure plans that produce visually compelling portraits while satisfying geometric and photometric feasibility in a 3D scene. Our approach builds a Photographic Scene Graph that represents scene affordances, subject-scene relations, and portrait-relevant lighting structure. Built on this representation, we perform aesthetic-guided comparative planning over previous attempts and current viewfinder observations. Experiments across diverse indoor and outdoor scenes show that our method produces portraits preferred by human raters and MLLM evaluators over competitive baselines, while maintaining high physical plausibility. Together, our results suggest a path from post-capture correction toward pre-capture computational portrait planning. Project repository: https://github.com/songrise/Before-the-Shutter