TAVA: Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors.

Coordinate-based volumetric representations have the potential to generate photo-realistic virtual avatars from images. However, virtual avatars need to be controllable and be rendered in novel poses that may not have been observed. Traditional techniques, such as LBS, provide such a controlling function; yet it usually requires a hand-designed body template, 3D scan data, and surface-based appearance models. On the other hand, neural representations have been shown to be powerful in representing visual details, but are under-explored in dynamic and articulated settings. In this paper, we propose TAVA, a method to create Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors, based on neural representations. We rely solely on multi-view data and a tracked skeleton to create a volumetric model of an actor, which can be animated at test time given novel poses. Since TAVA does not require a body template, it is applicable to humans as well as other creatures such as animals. Furthermore, TAVA is designed such that it can recover accurate dense correspondences, making it amenable to content-creation and editing tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method generalizes well to novel poses as well as unseen views and showcase basic editing capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/tava.