# Dynamic Point Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02626 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02626/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [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)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [SAL: Sign Agnostic Learning of Shapes from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10414/) (2019)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [State of the Art on Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03805/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Surface Splatting for Point-based Geometry Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04173/) (2019)
- [Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04758/) (2018)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [MetaSDF: Meta-learning Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09662/) (2020)
- [Markerless tracking of user-defined features with deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03142/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [GaussianAvatar: Towards Realistic Human Avatar Modeling from a Single Video via Animatable 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02134/) (2023)
- [Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08581/) (2023)
- [Human Gaussian Splatting: Real-time Rendering of Animatable Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17113/) (2023)
- [GauFRe: Gaussian Deformation Fields for Real-time Dynamic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11458/) (2023)
- [HiFi4G: High-Fidelity Human Performance Rendering via Compact Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03461/) (2023)
- [Neural Parametric Gaussians for Monocular Non-Rigid Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01196/) (2023)
- [SplatFields: Neural Gaussian Splats for Sparse 3D and 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11211/) (2024)
- [PIE-NeRF: Physics-based Interactive Elastodynamics with NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13099/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [Animatable and Relightable Gaussians for High-fidelity Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16096/) (2023)
- [PoNQ: a Neural QEM-based Mesh Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12870/) (2024)
- [CCL-LGS: Contrastive Codebook Learning for 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20469/) (2025)
- [SqueezeMe: Mobile-Ready Distillation of Gaussian Full-Body Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15171/) (2024)
- [Sequential Gaussian Avatars with Hierarchical Motion Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16768/) (2024)
- [Point-Based Radiance Fields for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03375/) (2023)
- [RMAvatar: Photorealistic Human Avatar Reconstruction from Monocular Video Based on Rectified Mesh-embedded Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07104/) (2025)
- [Landmark-Free Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Registration in Laparoscopic Liver Resection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15152/) (2025)
- [Space-time 2D Gaussian Splatting for Accurate Surface Reconstruction under Complex Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18852/) (2024)
- [Degrees of Freedom Matter: Inferring Dynamics from Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03625/) (2024)
- [Advances in Radiance Field for Dynamic Scene: From Neural Field to Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10049/) (2025)
- [Occlusion-aware Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration via Unsupervised Neural Deformation Correntropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10704/) (2025)
- [ShapeShifter: 3D Variations Using Multiscale and Sparse Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02187/) (2025)
- [LOD-GS: Level-of-Detail-Sensitive 3D Gaussian Splatting for Detail Conserved Anti-Aliasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00554/) (2025)
- [FreeCloth: Free-form Generation Enhances Challenging Clothed Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19942/) (2024)
- [Human Geometry Distribution for 3D Animation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07459/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Wardrobe: Compositional 3D Gaussian Avatars for Free-Form Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04290/) (2026)
- [SPARE: Symmetrized Point-to-Plane Distance for Robust Non-Rigid 3D Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20188/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in the field of neural surface reconstruction. While the extensive focus was put on volumetric and implicit approaches, a number of works have shown that explicit graphics primitives such as point clouds can significantly reduce computational complexity, without sacrificing the reconstructed surface quality. However, less emphasis has been put on modeling dynamic surfaces with point primitives. In this work, we present a dynamic point field model that combines the representational benefits of explicit point-based graphics with implicit deformation networks to allow efficient modeling of non-rigid 3D surfaces. Using explicit surface primitives also allows us to easily incorporate well-established constraints such as-isometric-as-possible regularisation. While learning this deformation model is prone to local optima when trained in a fully unsupervised manner, we propose to additionally leverage semantic information such as keypoint dynamics to guide the deformation learning. We demonstrate our model with an example application of creating an expressive animatable human avatar from a collection of 3D scans. Here, previous methods mostly rely on variants of the linear blend skinning paradigm, which fundamentally limits the expressivity of such models when dealing with complex cloth appearances such as long skirts. We show the advantages of our dynamic point field framework in terms of its representational power, learning efficiency, and robustness to out-of-distribution novel poses.