SIGGRAPH 2021
Deep Relightable Appearance Models for Animatable Faces
- 1 University of California, San Diego
- 2 Facebook Reality Labs
Abstract
We present a method for building high-fidelity
animatable 3D face models that can be posed and
rendered with novel lighting environments in
real-time. Our main insight is that relightable
models trained to produce an image lit from a
single light direction can generalize to natural
illumination conditions but are computationally
expensive to render. On the other hand,
efficient, high-fidelity face models trained
with point-light data do not generalize to novel
lighting conditions. We leverage the strengths
of each of these two approaches. We first train
an expensive but generalizable model on
point-light illuminations, and use it to
generate a training set of high-quality
synthetic face images under natural illumination
conditions. We then train an efficient model on
this augmented dataset, reducing the
generalization ability requirements. As the
efficacy of this approach hinges on the quality
of the synthetic data we can generate, we
present a study of lighting pattern combinations
for dynamic captures and evaluate their
suitability for learning generalizable
relightable models. Towards achieving the best
possible quality, we present a novel approach
for generating dynamic relightable faces that
exceeds state-of-the-art performance. Our method
is capable of capturing subtle lighting effects
and can even generate compelling near-field
relighting despite being trained exclusively
with far-field lighting data. Finally, we
motivate the utility of our model by animating
it with images captured from VR-headset mounted
cameras, demonstrating the first system for
face-driven interactions in VR that uses a
photorealistic relightable face model.
Paper
Video
Citation
@article{bi2021avatar, author = {Sai Bi and Stephen Lombardi and Shunsuke Saito and Tomas Simon and Shih-En Wei and Kevyn McPhail and Ravi Ramamoorthi and Yaser Sheikh and Jason Saragih}, title = {Deep Relightable Appearance Models for Animatable Faces}, journal = {ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. SIGGRAPH)}, volume = {40}, number = {4}, year = {2021}, publisher = {ACM}, }