# ANR: Articulated Neural Rendering for Virtual Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12890 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12890/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04334/) (2022)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [TAVA: Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08929/) (2022)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)
- [HuMMan: Multi-Modal 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Sensing and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13686/) (2022)
- [Structured Local Radiance Fields for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14478/) (2022)
- [Neural Actor: Neural Free-view Synthesis of Human Actors with Pose Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02019/) (2021)
- [The Power of Points for Modeling Humans in Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01137/) (2021)
- [AvatarReX: Real-time Expressive Full-body Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04789/) (2023)
- [MetaAvatar: Learning Animatable Clothed Human Models from Few Depth Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11944/) (2021)
- [KeypointNeRF: Generalizing Image-based Volumetric Avatars using Relative Spatial Encoding of Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04992/) (2022)
- [Learning Neural Volumetric Representations of Dynamic Humans in Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12237/) (2023)
- [Modeling Clothing as a Separate Layer for an Animatable Human Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14879/) (2021)
- [Drivable Volumetric Avatars using Texel-Aligned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09774/) (2022)
- [PINA: Learning a Personalized Implicit Neural Avatar from a Single RGB-D Video Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01754/) (2022)
- [Pose with Style: Detail-Preserving Pose-Guided Image Synthesis with Conditional StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06166/) (2021)
- [Relighting4D: Neural Relightable Human from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07104/) (2022)
- [Generalizable Neural Performer: Learning Robust Radiance Fields for Human Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11798/) (2022)
- [HVTR: Hybrid Volumetric-Textural Rendering for Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10203/) (2021)
- [Animatable Implicit Neural Representations for Creating Realistic Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08133/) (2022)
- [HAHA: Highly Articulated Gaussian Human Avatars with Textured Mesh Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01053/) (2024)
- [VariTex: Variational Neural Face Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05988/) (2021)
- [DINAR: Diffusion Inpainting of Neural Textures for One-Shot Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09375/) (2023)
- [NVFi: Neural Velocity Fields for 3D Physics Learning from Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06398/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Neural Garments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11811/) (2021)
- [HumanLiff: Layer-wise 3D Human Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09712/) (2023)
- [Drivable Avatar Clothing: Faithful Full-Body Telepresence with Dynamic Clothing Driven by Sparse RGB-D Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05917/) (2023)
- [CaPhy: Capturing Physical Properties for Animatable Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05925/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The combination of traditional rendering with neural networks in Deferred Neural Rendering (DNR) provides a compelling balance between computational complexity and realism of the resulting images. Using skinned meshes for rendering articulating objects is a natural extension for the DNR framework and would open it up to a plethora of applications. However, in this case the neural shading step must account for deformations that are possibly not captured in the mesh, as well as alignment inaccuracies and dynamics -- which can confound the DNR pipeline. We present Articulated Neural Rendering (ANR), a novel framework based on DNR which explicitly addresses its limitations for virtual human avatars. We show the superiority of ANR not only with respect to DNR but also with methods specialized for avatar creation and animation. In two user studies, we observe a clear preference for our avatar model and we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on quantitative evaluation metrics. Perceptually, we observe better temporal stability, level of detail and plausibility.