AvatarCraft: Transforming Text into Neural Human Avatars with Parameterized Shape and Pose Control

Neural implicit fields are powerful for representing 3D scenes and generating high-quality novel views, but it remains challenging to use such implicit representations for creating a 3D human avatar with a specific identity and artistic style that can be easily animated. Our proposed method, AvatarCraft, addresses this challenge by using diffusion models to guide the learning of geometry and texture for a neural avatar based on a single text prompt. We carefully design the optimization framework of neural implicit fields, including a coarse-to-fine multi-bounding box training strategy, shape regularization, and diffusion-based constraints, to produce high-quality geometry and texture. Additionally, we make the human avatar animatable by deforming the neural implicit field with an explicit warping field that maps the target human mesh to a template human mesh, both represented using parametric human models. This simplifies animation and reshaping of the generated avatar by controlling pose and shape parameters. Extensive experiments on various text descriptions show that AvatarCraft is effective and robust in creating human avatars and rendering novel views, poses, and shapes. Our project page is: https://avatar-craft.github.io/.Comment: ICCV 2023 Camera Read

Designing Digital Art and Communication Tools Inspired by Traditional Craft

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Perspective in Two Dimensions for Computer Graphics

Computer graphics perspective is based on photography, the pin-hole camera model. This thesis examines the perspective as practiced by artists, who develop the picture geometry within the planar surface of the canvas. Their approach is flexible, depth is simulated with planar composition as the primary geometry. Renaissance artists discovered construction methods to draw the foreshortening of realistic pictures: the construction of a tiled floor in perspective was fundamental. This thesis presents the framework, a computer program, I developed to create the perspective of pictures based on the geometry practices of artists. Construction lines on the image plane simulate the 3D geometry of the pictorial space; cartoons of foreground elements are manipulated in 2D within the picture perspective; projected shadows, examples of double projection, are also included. A formalism, reformulating algebraically the straight-edge and compass evaluations, generalizes the planar geometry that solves the challenge of depicting 3D. A revised Painter’s algorithm produces the occlusions between the picture elements from sequencing them from their definitions on the canvas

Images without metaphor: re-visioning French film theory

This dissertation traces a lineage of writings on the cinema that forms a counter-tradition to the linguistically-grounded French theory that ushered in film studies as a field. While film theory of the 1960s and 70s exhibited a profound skepticism toward the sensible qualities of the image, the tradition assembled here takes a decidedly aesthetic approach to the cinema, considering its images as a sensible terrain that remains irreducible to language. Far from suggesting a "naïve" embrace of the sensible in and of itself, however, this tradition foregrounds the cinema's capacity to produce images that challenge the clichés of common sense thought. Gilles Deleuze's two volumes on the cinema, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, have elaborated this approach most conspicuously, but the genealogy this project traces encompasses Jean Epstein's film-philosophical writings on photogénie, André Bazin's phenomenological criticism, and Roland Barthes's late writings on cinema and photography. In assembling this lineage of criticism, this dissertation aims to revalue a body of writing liable to be dismissed as impressionist, and to extract the critical stakes of an aesthetically engaged film theory: a theory that does not subsume films to known concepts, but explores the cinema's potential to produce new sensations of thought

InSEA European Regional Congress: Tales of art and curiosity

Proceedings volume from the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) European Regional Congress