# Interactive Rendering of Relightable and Animatable Gaussian Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2024.

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

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [PhySG: Inverse Rendering with Spherical Gaussians for Physics-based Material Editing and Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00674/) (2021)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04758/) (2018)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [Neural-PIL: Neural Pre-Integrated Lighting for Reflectance Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14373/) (2021)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [Modeling Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06837/) (2022)
- [TensoIR: Tensorial Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12461/) (2023)
- [GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02973/) (2023)
- [Shape, Light, and Material Decomposition from Images using Monte Carlo Rendering and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03380/) (2022)
- [NeRO: Neural Geometry and BRDF Reconstruction of Reflective Objects from Multiview Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17398/) (2023)
- [HumanRF: High-Fidelity Neural Radiance Fields for Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06356/) (2023)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [Single Image Portrait Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00824/) (2019)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)
- [InstantAvatar: Learning Avatars from Monocular Video in 60 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10550/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Generalizable and Relightable Gaussian Splatting for Human Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21502/) (2025)
- [DNF-Avatar: Distilling Neural Fields for Real-time Animatable Avatar Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10486/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity Mobile Avatars with Pruned Local Blendshapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01854/) (2026)
- [LumiMotion: Improving Gaussian Relighting with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10994/) (2026)
- [EgoRelight: Egocentric Human Capture and Illumination Recovery for Relightable and Photoreal Avatar Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28401/) (2026)
- [RAGA: Real Time Ray Traced Gaussian Shadow Casting for 3DGS Avatar-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29329/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating relightable and animatable avatars from multi-view or monocular videos is a challenging task for digital human creation and virtual reality applications. Previous methods rely on neural radiance fields or ray tracing, resulting in slow training and rendering processes. By utilizing Gaussian Splatting, we propose a simple and efficient method to decouple body materials and lighting from sparse-view or monocular avatar videos, so that the avatar can be rendered simultaneously under novel viewpoints, poses, and lightings at interactive frame rates (6.9 fps). Specifically, we first obtain the canonical body mesh using a signed distance function and assign attributes to each mesh vertex. The Gaussians in the canonical space then interpolate from nearby body mesh vertices to obtain the attributes. We subsequently deform the Gaussians to the posed space using forward skinning, and combine the learnable environment light with the Gaussian attributes for shading computation. To achieve fast shadow modeling, we rasterize the posed body mesh from dense viewpoints to obtain the visibility. Our approach is not only simple but also fast enough to allow interactive rendering of avatar animation under environmental light changes. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to previous works, our method can render higher quality results at a faster speed on both synthetic and real datasets.