# Creating and Reenacting Controllable 3D Humans with Differentiable Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [State of the Art on Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03805/) (2020)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Liquid Warping GAN: A Unified Framework for Human Motion Imitation, Appearance Transfer and Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12224/) (2019)
- [A Variational U-Net for Conditional Appearance and Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04694/) (2018)
- [Differentiable Rendering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12057/) (2020)
- [Image GANs meet Differentiable Rendering for Inverse Graphics and Interpretable 3D Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09125/) (2020)
- [ReenactGAN: Learning to Reenact Faces via Boundary Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11079/) (2018)
- [Motion Guided 3D Pose Estimation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13985/) (2020)
- [Dense Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01995/) (2018)
- [360-Degree Textures of People in Clothing from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07117/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AvatarGen: A 3D Generative Model for Animatable Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14589/) (2022)
- [Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14312/) (2023)
- [AvatarGen: a 3D Generative Model for Animatable Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00561/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a new end-to-end neural rendering architecture to transfer appearance and reenact human actors. Our method leverages a carefully designed graph convolutional network (GCN) to model the human body manifold structure, jointly with differentiable rendering, to synthesize new videos of people in different contexts from where they were initially recorded. Unlike recent appearance transferring methods, our approach can reconstruct a fully controllable 3D texture-mapped model of a person, while taking into account the manifold structure from body shape and texture appearance in the view synthesis. Specifically, our approach models mesh deformations with a three-stage GCN trained in a self-supervised manner on rendered silhouettes of the human body. It also infers texture appearance with a convolutional network in the texture domain, which is trained in an adversarial regime to reconstruct human texture from rendered images of actors in different poses. Experiments on different videos show that our method successfully infers specific body deformations and avoid creating texture artifacts while achieving the best values for appearance in terms of Structural Similarity (SSIM), Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Fr'echet Video Distance (FVD). By taking advantages of both differentiable rendering and the 3D parametric model, our method is fully controllable, which allows controlling the human synthesis from both pose and rendering parameters. The source code is available at https://www.verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/retargeting-motion/wacv2022.