DRiVE: Diffusion-based Rigging Empowers Generation of Versatile and Expressive Characters

Mingze Sun, Junhao Chen, Junting Dong, Yurun Chen, Xinyu Jiang, Shiwei Mao, Puhua Jiang, Jingbo Wang, Bo Dai, Ruqi Huang; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 21170-21180

Recent advances in generative models have enabled high-quality 3D character reconstruction from multi-modal. However, animating these generated characters remains a challenging task, especially for complex elements like garments and hair, due to the lack of large-scale datasets and effective rigging methods. To address this gap, we curate AnimeRig, a large-scale dataset with detailed skeleton and skinning annotations. Building upon this, we propose DRiVE, a novel framework for generating and rigging 3D human characters with intricate structures. Unlike existing methods, DRiVE utilizes a 3D Gaussian representation, facilitating efficient animation and high-quality rendering. We further introduce GSDiff, a 3D Gaussian-based diffusion module that predicts joint positions as spatial distributions, overcoming the limitations of regression-based approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRiVE achieves precise rigging results, enabling realistic dynamics for clothing and hair, and surpassing previous methods in both quality and versatility. Code, dataset and visualization results are available at https://DRiVEAvatar.github.io/.