How to Build Digital Humans?
From Priors to Photorealistic Avatars

Wojciech Zielonka^1†, Tobias Kirschstein^2†, Timo Bolkart^3†, Simon Giebenhain², Vanessa Sklyarova^5,8, Xiang Deng⁴, Donglai Xiang⁶, Shunsuke Saito¹, Yebin Liu⁴, Matthias Niessner², Justus Thies^7†

¹Meta ²Technical University of Munich ³Google ⁴Tsinghua University
⁵Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems ⁶NVIDIA ⁷Technical University of Darmstadt ⁸ETH Zurich

† These authors contributed equally.

Code arXiv Video Paper

Figure 1: Building digital avatars requires considering many components, such as the human head, hair, hands, and garments, and ultimately full-body avatars. Much like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man symbolizes the ideal proportions and unity of the human form, the construction of digital avatars demands a holistic approach in which each part integrates into a coherent whole. Each of these elements presents distinct challenges and numerous potential design choices across different stages. In this report, we introduce and examine the details of each creation stage, develop a practical taxonomy of the current literature, and discuss future directions in the field of digital avatars. The background image was generated using Google Gemini.

Abstract

This state-of-the-art report provides an overview of controllable 3D human avatar creation. We describe current 3D avatar systems, which typically consist of three stages: (i) learning priors of human appearance and motion, (ii) creating a personalized avatar, and (iii) animating the avatar. To limit the scope, we focus on the prior learning and avatar creation stages. We define current avatar representations and introduce a taxonomy that categorizes existing work along multiple axes, including body regions and employed priors. We review methods for full-body and head avatars, as well as layered representations that decompose the body into components such as hands, hair, and garments. Finally, we outline common underlying principles, reference key literature for newcomers, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.

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