# SCALE: Modeling Clothed Humans with a Surface Codec of Articulated Local Elements

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [Local Implicit Grid Representations for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08981/) (2020)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01456/) (2020)
- [DISN: Deep Implicit Surface Network for High-quality Single-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10711/) (2019)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [Deep Local Shapes: Learning Local SDF Priors for Detailed 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10983/) (2020)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for Implicit Function Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13938/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [SelfRecon: Self Reconstruction Your Digital Avatar from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12792/) (2022)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)
- [Realistic One-shot Mesh-based Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08343/) (2022)
- [Structured Local Radiance Fields for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14478/) (2022)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [The Power of Points for Modeling Humans in Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01137/) (2021)
- [MetaAvatar: Learning Animatable Clothed Human Models from Few Depth Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11944/) (2021)
- [gDNA: Towards Generative Detailed Neural Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04123/) (2022)
- [Modeling Clothing as a Separate Layer for an Animatable Human Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14879/) (2021)
- [X-Avatar: Expressive Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04805/) (2023)
- [CoNeRF: Controllable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01983/) (2021)
- [Drivable Volumetric Avatars using Texel-Aligned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09774/) (2022)
- [Learning Locally Editable Virtual Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00121/) (2023)
- [PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04421/) (2024)
- [Learning Implicit Templates for Point-Based Clothed Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06955/) (2022)
- [PoseVocab: Learning Joint-structured Pose Embeddings for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13006/) (2023)
- [Locally Aware Piecewise Transformation Fields for 3D Human Mesh Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08160/) (2021)
- [Registering Explicit to Implicit: Towards High-Fidelity Garment mesh Reconstruction from Single Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15007/) (2022)
- [Predicting Loose-Fitting Garment Deformations Using Bone-Driven Motion Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01355/) (2022)
- [Point-Based Modeling of Human Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08230/) (2021)
- [Learned Vertex Descent: A New Direction for 3D Human Model Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06254/) (2022)
- [MeshAvatar: Learning High-quality Triangular Human Avatars from Multi-view Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08414/) (2024)
- [HVTR: Hybrid Volumetric-Textural Rendering for Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10203/) (2021)
- [Neural Point-based Shape Modeling of Humans in Challenging Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06814/) (2022)
- [Animatable and Relightable Gaussians for High-fidelity Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16096/) (2023)
- [DIG: Draping Implicit Garment over the Human Body](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10845/) (2022)
- [D-IF: Uncertainty-aware Human Digitization via Implicit Distribution Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08857/) (2023)
- [AvatarCap: Animatable Avatar Conditioned Monocular Human Volumetric Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02031/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning to model and reconstruct humans in clothing is challenging due to articulation, non-rigid deformation, and varying clothing types and topologies. To enable learning, the choice of representation is the key. Recent work uses neural networks to parameterize local surface elements. This approach captures locally coherent geometry and non-planar details, can deal with varying topology, and does not require registered training data. However, naively using such methods to model 3D clothed humans fails to capture fine-grained local deformations and generalizes poorly. To address this, we present three key innovations: First, we deform surface elements based on a human body model such that large-scale deformations caused by articulation are explicitly separated from topological changes and local clothing deformations. Second, we address the limitations of existing neural surface elements by regressing local geometry from local features, significantly improving the expressiveness. Third, we learn a pose embedding on a 2D parameterization space that encodes posed body geometry, improving generalization to unseen poses by reducing non-local spurious correlations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our surface representation by learning models of complex clothing from point clouds. The clothing can change topology and deviate from the topology of the body. Once learned, we can animate previously unseen motions, producing high-quality point clouds, from which we generate realistic images with neural rendering. We assess the importance of each technical contribution and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and inference time. The code is available for research purposes at https://qianlim.github.io/SCALE .