UltrAvatar: A Realistic Animatable 3D Avatar Diffusion Model with Authenticity Guided Textures

Mingyuan Zhou, Rakib Hyder, Ziwei Xuan, Guojun Qi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1238-1248

Recent advances in 3D avatar generation have gained significant attention. These breakthroughs aim to produce more realistic animatable avatars narrowing the gap between virtual and real-world experiences. Most of existing works employ Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss combined with a differentiable renderer and text condition to guide a diffusion model in generating 3D avatars. However SDS often generates over-smoothed results with few facial details thereby lacking the diversity compared with ancestral sampling. On the other hand other works generate 3D avatar from a single image where the challenges of unwanted lighting effects perspective views and inferior image quality make them difficult to reliably reconstruct the 3D face meshes with the aligned complete textures. In this paper we propose a novel 3D avatar generation approach termed UltrAvatar with enhanced fidelity of geometry and superior quality of physically based rendering (PBR) textures without unwanted lighting. To this end the proposed approach presents a diffuse color extraction model and an authenticity guided texture diffusion model. The former removes the unwanted lighting effects to reveal true diffuse colors so that the generated avatars can be rendered under various lighting conditions. The latter follows two gradient-based guidances for generating PBR textures to render diverse face-identity features and details better aligning with 3D mesh geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the experiments.