# MoDA: Modeling Deformable 3D Objects from Casual Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08279 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08279/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [TAVA: Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08929/) (2022)
- [Monocular Total Capture: Posing Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01598/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [GaussianEditor: Swift and Controllable 3D Editing with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14521/) (2023)
- [ArtGS: Building Interactable Replicas of Complex Articulated Objects via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19459/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing Animatable Categories from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06351/) (2023)
- [REACTO: Reconstructing Articulated Objects from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11151/) (2024)
- [MagicArticulate: Make Your 3D Models Articulation-Ready](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12135/) (2025)
- [Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10898/) (2025)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [Sculpt3D: Multi-View Consistent Text-to-3D Generation with Sparse 3D Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09140/) (2024)
- [Sync4D: Video Guided Controllable Dynamics for Physics-Based 4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16849/) (2024)
- [High Quality Human Image Animation using Regional Supervision and Motion Blur Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19580/) (2024)
- [Advances in Radiance Field for Dynamic Scene: From Neural Field to Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10049/) (2025)
- [Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04978/) (2025)
- [SPRig: Self-Supervised Pose-Invariant Rigging from Mesh Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12740/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we focus on the challenges of modeling deformable 3D objects from casual videos. With the popularity of neural radiance fields (NeRF), many works extend it to dynamic scenes with a canonical NeRF and a deformation model that achieves 3D point transformation between the observation space and the canonical space. Recent works rely on linear blend skinning (LBS) to achieve the canonical-observation transformation. However, the linearly weighted combination of rigid transformation matrices is not guaranteed to be rigid. As a matter of fact, unexpected scale and shear factors often appear. In practice, using LBS as the deformation model can always lead to skin-collapsing artifacts for bending or twisting motions. To solve this problem, we propose neural dual quaternion blend skinning (NeuDBS) to achieve 3D point deformation, which can perform rigid transformation without skin-collapsing artifacts. In the endeavor to register 2D pixels across different frames, we establish a correspondence between canonical feature embeddings that encodes 3D points within the canonical space, and 2D image features by solving an optimal transport problem. Besides, we introduce a texture filtering approach for texture rendering that effectively minimizes the impact of noisy colors outside target deformable objects. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets show that our approach can reconstruct 3D models for humans and animals with better qualitative and quantitative performance than state-of-the-art methods. Project page: urlhttps://chaoyuesong.github.io/MoDA.