# Faithful Contouring: Near-Lossless 3D Voxel Representation Free from Iso-surface

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04029/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04400/) (2023)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Wonder3D: Single Image to 3D using Cross-Domain Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15008/) (2023)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [One-2-3-45: Any Single Image to 3D Mesh in 45 Seconds without Per-Shape Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16928/) (2023)
- [CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13897/) (2024)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [InstantMesh: Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image with Sparse-view Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07191/) (2024)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Meshy T2: Fast Native Mesh Generation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28675/) (2026)
- [Mesh BDF: Barycentric Dominance Field for 3D Native Mesh Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31777/) (2026)
- [MSVS-VAE: Multi-Scale Anchored VecSet for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24436/) (2026)
- [P2Voxel: Pyramid Pivot Voxelization for 3D Mesh Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07549/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and efficient voxelized representations of 3D meshes are the foundation of 3D reconstruction and generation. However, existing representations based on iso-surface heavily rely on water-tightening or rendering optimization, which inevitably compromise geometric fidelity. We propose Faithful Contouring, a sparse voxelized representation that supports 2048+ resolutions for arbitrary meshes, requiring neither converting meshes to field functions nor extracting the isosurface during remeshing. It achieves near-lossless fidelity by preserving sharpness and internal structures, even for challenging cases with complex geometry and topology. The proposed method also shows flexibility for texturing, manipulation, and editing. Beyond representation, we design a dual-mode autoencoder for Faithful Contouring, enabling scalable and detail-preserving shape reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that Faithful Contouring surpasses existing methods in accuracy and efficiency for both representation and reconstruction. For direct representation, it achieves distance errors at the 10-5 level; for mesh reconstruction, it yields a 93% reduction in Chamfer Distance and a 35% improvement in F-score over strong baselines, confirming superior fidelity as a representation for 3D learning tasks.