# ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05941/

## Key facts

- Cited by 104 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [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)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Space-time Neural Irradiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12950/) (2020)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 104)

- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [Spec-Gaussian: Anisotropic View-Dependent Appearance for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15870/) (2024)
- [CG-SLAM: Efficient Dense RGB-D SLAM in a Consistent Uncertainty-aware 3D Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16095/) (2024)
- [HumanSplat: Generalizable Single-Image Human Gaussian Splatting with Structure Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12459/) (2024)
- [SplatFields: Neural Gaussian Splats for Sparse 3D and 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11211/) (2024)
- [PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04421/) (2024)
- [SWinGS: Sliding Windows for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13308/) (2023)
- [ConvoFusion: Multi-Modal Conversational Diffusion for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17936/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Human Gaussians for Sparse View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12777/) (2024)
- [HAHA: Highly Articulated Gaussian Human Avatars with Textured Mesh Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01053/) (2024)
- [GaussianHeads: End-to-End Learning of Drivable Gaussian Head Avatars from Coarse-to-fine Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11951/) (2024)
- [Vid2Avatar-Pro: Authentic Avatar from Videos in the Wild via Universal Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01610/) (2025)
- [Robust Dual Gaussian Splatting for Immersive Human-centric Volumetric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08353/) (2024)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [LayGA: Layered Gaussian Avatars for Animatable Clothing Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07319/) (2024)
- [Relightable Full-Body Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14726/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Eigen Models for Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04545/) (2024)
- [Holoported Characters: Real-time Free-viewpoint Rendering of Humans from Sparse RGB Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07423/) (2023)
- [UV Gaussians: Joint Learning of Mesh Deformation and Gaussian Textures for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11589/) (2024)
- [Advancing Extended Reality with 3D Gaussian Splatting: Innovations and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06257/) (2024)
- [PERSONA: Personalized Whole-Body 3D Avatar with Pose-Driven Deformations from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09973/) (2025)
- [Surfel-based Gaussian Inverse Rendering for Fast and Relightable Dynamic Human Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15212/) (2024)
- [Real-time High-fidelity Gaussian Human Avatars with Position-based Interpolation of Spatially Distributed MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12909/) (2025)
- [Relightable Neural Actor with Intrinsic Decomposition and Pose Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11587/) (2023)
- [MetaCap: Meta-learning Priors from Multi-View Imagery for Sparse-view Human Performance Capture and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18820/) (2024)
- [SqueezeMe: Mobile-Ready Distillation of Gaussian Full-Body Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15171/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time rendering of photorealistic and controllable human avatars stands as a cornerstone in Computer Vision and Graphics. While recent advances in neural implicit rendering have unlocked unprecedented photorealism for digital avatars, real-time performance has mostly been demonstrated for static scenes only. To address this, we propose ASH, an animatable Gaussian splatting approach for photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans in real-time. We parameterize the clothed human as animatable 3D Gaussians, which can be efficiently splatted into image space to generate the final rendering. However, naively learning the Gaussian parameters in 3D space poses a severe challenge in terms of compute. Instead, we attach the Gaussians onto a deformable character model, and learn their parameters in 2D texture space, which allows leveraging efficient 2D convolutional architectures that easily scale with the required number of Gaussians. We benchmark ASH with competing methods on pose-controllable avatars, demonstrating that our method outperforms existing real-time methods by a large margin and shows comparable or even better results than offline methods.