Daily Papers

In this paper, we focus on the task of generalizable neural human rendering which trains conditional Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) from multi-view videos of different characters. To handle the dynamic human motion, previous methods have primarily used a SparseConvNet (SPC)-based human representation to process the painted SMPL. However, such SPC-based representation i) optimizes under the volatile observation space which leads to the pose-misalignment between training and inference stages, and ii) lacks the global relationships among human parts that is critical for handling the incomplete painted SMPL. Tackling these issues, we present a brand-new framework named TransHuman, which learns the painted SMPL under the canonical space and captures the global relationships between human parts with transformers. Specifically, TransHuman is mainly composed of Transformer-based Human Encoding (TransHE), Deformable Partial Radiance Fields (DPaRF), and Fine-grained Detail Integration (FDI). TransHE first processes the painted SMPL under the canonical space via transformers for capturing the global relationships between human parts. Then, DPaRF binds each output token with a deformable radiance field for encoding the query point under the observation space. Finally, the FDI is employed to further integrate fine-grained information from reference images. Extensive experiments on ZJU-MoCap and H36M show that our TransHuman achieves a significantly new state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Project page: https://pansanity666.github.io/TransHuman/

Colorizing line art is a pivotal task in the production of hand-drawn cel animation. This typically involves digital painters using a paint bucket tool to manually color each segment enclosed by lines, based on RGB values predetermined by a color designer. This frame-by-frame process is both arduous and time-intensive. Current automated methods mainly focus on segment matching. This technique migrates colors from a reference to the target frame by aligning features within line-enclosed segments across frames. However, issues like occlusion and wrinkles in animations often disrupt these direct correspondences, leading to mismatches. In this work, we introduce a new learning-based inclusion matching pipeline, which directs the network to comprehend the inclusion relationships between segments rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. Our method features a two-stage pipeline that integrates a coarse color warping module with an inclusion matching module, enabling more nuanced and accurate colorization. To facilitate the training of our network, we also develope a unique dataset, referred to as PaintBucket-Character. This dataset includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized counterparts, featuring various 3D characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over existing techniques.

In this paper, we introduced a novel text-to-avatar generation method that separately generates the human body and the clothes and allows high-quality animation on the generated avatar. While recent advancements in text-to-avatar generation have yielded diverse human avatars from text prompts, these methods typically combine all elements-clothes, hair, and body-into a single 3D representation. Such an entangled approach poses challenges for downstream tasks like editing or animation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel disentangled 3D avatar representation named Sequentially Offset-SMPL (SO-SMPL), building upon the SMPL model. SO-SMPL represents the human body and clothes with two separate meshes, but associates them with offsets to ensure the physical alignment between the body and the clothes. Then, we design an Score Distillation Sampling(SDS)-based distillation framework to generate the proposed SO-SMPL representation from text prompts. In comparison with existing text-to-avatar methods, our approach not only achieves higher exture and geometry quality and better semantic alignment with text prompts, but also significantly improves the visual quality of character animation, virtual try-on, and avatar editing. Our project page is at https://shanemankiw.github.io/SO-SMPL/.

Painting embodies a unique form of visual storytelling, where the creation process is as significant as the final artwork. Although recent advances in generative models have enabled visually compelling painting synthesis, most existing methods focus solely on final image generation or patch-based process simulation, lacking explicit stroke structure and failing to produce smooth, realistic shading. In this work, we present a differentiable stroke reconstruction framework that unifies painting, stylized texturing, and smudging to faithfully reproduce the human painting-smudging loop. Given an input image, our framework first optimizes single- and dual-color Bezier strokes through a parallel differentiable paint renderer, followed by a style generation module that synthesizes geometry-conditioned textures across diverse painting styles. We further introduce a differentiable smudge operator to enable natural color blending and shading. Coupled with a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy, our method jointly optimizes stroke geometry, color, and texture under geometric and semantic guidance. Extensive experiments on oil, watercolor, ink, and digital paintings demonstrate that our approach produces realistic and expressive stroke reconstructions, smooth tonal transitions, and richly stylized appearances, offering a unified model for expressive digital painting creation. See our project page for more demos: https://yingjiang96.github.io/DiffPaintWebsite/.

Line art colorization plays a crucial role in hand-drawn animation production, where digital artists manually colorize segments using a paint bucket tool, guided by RGB values from character color design sheets. This process, often called paint bucket colorization, involves two main tasks: keyframe colorization, where colors are applied according to the character's color design sheet, and consecutive frame colorization, where these colors are replicated across adjacent frames. Current automated colorization methods primarily focus on reference-based and segment-matching approaches. However, reference-based methods often fail to accurately assign specific colors to each region, while matching-based methods are limited to consecutive frame colorization and struggle with issues like significant deformation and occlusion. In this work, we introduce inclusion matching, which allows the network to understand the inclusion relationships between segments, rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. By integrating this approach with segment parsing and color warping modules, our inclusion matching pipeline significantly improves performance in both keyframe colorization and consecutive frame colorization. To support our network's training, we have developed a unique dataset named PaintBucket-Character, which includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized versions and shading annotations for various 3D characters. To replicate industry animation data formats, we also created color design sheets for each character, with semantic information for each color and standard pose reference images. Experiments highlight the superiority of our method, demonstrating accurate and consistent colorization across both our proposed benchmarks and hand-drawn animations.