Efficient 3D Articulated Human Generation with Layered Surface Volumes

Yinghao Xu, Wang Yifan, Alexander W. Bergman, Menglei Chai, Bolei Zhou, Gordon Wetzstein

Abstract: Access to high-quality and diverse 3D articulated digital human assets is crucial in various applications, ranging from virtual reality to social platforms. Generative approaches, such as 3D generative adversarial networks (GANs), are rapidly replacing laborious manual content creation tools. Existing 3D GAN frameworks typically rely on explicit representations that are fast to render but offer limited quality, or implicit representations, which offer high capacity but are slow to render, thereby limiting the 3D fidelity in GAN settings. In this work, we introduce layered surface volumes (LSVs) as a new 3D representation for articulatable humans. LSVs represent a human body using multiple textured mesh layers around a conventional mesh template. The explicit mesh layers can be interpreted as a discretized volume with finite thickness located around the template manifold, as such it has the capacity to capture off-template details like hair or accessories, while at the same time it can profit from mesh rasterization for fast rendering. LSVs can be articulated, and they exhibit exceptional efficiency in GAN settings. Trained on unstructured, single-view 2D image datasets, our LSV-GAN generates high-quality and viewconsistent 3D articulated digital humans without the need for view-inconsistent 2D upsampling networks. Project page can be found here.