LegacyAvatars: Volumetric Face Avatars For Traditional Graphics Pipelines

2026-01-18

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of efficiently rendering high-fidelity, animatable 3D facial avatars within traditional graphics pipelines. By integrating neural radiance fields with a parametric face model, the method learns a radiance manifold in 3D space during a registration phase and produces an explicit hierarchical mesh along with corresponding appearance and deformation textures. At deployment, it enables efficient animation and real-time rendering through linear blend skinning and alpha compositing on a static mesh. This approach achieves, for the first time, a seamless transfer of radiance field–based photorealistic 3D faces into classical graphics pipelines, operating efficiently on legacy hardware without requiring custom engines or specialized hardware, while supporting online streaming.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: 3D Computer Vision
• Machine Learning: Learning with Manifolds
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

We introduce a novel representation for efficient classical rendering of photorealistic 3D face avatars. Leveraging recent advances in radiance fields anchored to parametric face models, our approach achieves controllable volumetric rendering of complex facial features, including hair, skin, and eyes. At enrollment time, we learn a set of radiance manifolds in 3D space to extract an explicit layered mesh, along with appearance and warp textures. During deployment, this allows us to control and animate the face through simple linear blending and alpha compositing of textures over a static mesh. This explicit representation also enables the generated avatar to be efficiently streamed online and then rendered using classical mesh and shader-based rendering on legacy graphics platforms, eliminating the need for any custom engineering or integration.

Problem

• volumetric face avatars
• legacy graphics pipelines
• photorealistic rendering
• classical mesh rendering
• 3D face animation

Innovation

• volumetric face avatars
• radiance fields
• parametric face models
• explicit mesh representation
• legacy graphics pipelines