Differentiable path tracing offers a principled route to recovering physical material and lighting parameters, but the combination of high variance and poor numerical conditioning often makes it too brittle to use in practice. This is especially the case when lighting is altogether unknown, or when the scene contains complex light transport effects. Prior work recently showed that the variance reduction provided by a radiance cache can alleviate these challenges. We revisit the combination of inverse rendering and radiance caching with a twist, by introducing a spatial blending field that locally interpolates between the cache and standard unbiased estimators. Recursive application of this idea yields a rich design space of evaluation strategies and inter-estimator consistency losses; we map this space and identify effective components. A surprising property of the resulting algorithm is that it can accurately recover material parameters even when the lighting is not uniquely identifiable from the observations. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in speed and robustness over prior work, making a strong case for including radiance caching as a standard component of future physically based inverse rendering systems.

Despite recent advances in multi-view hair reconstruction, achieving strand-level precision remains a significant challenge due to inherent limitations in existing capture pipelines. We introduce GroomCap , a novel multi-view hair capture method that reconstructs faithful and high-fidelity hair geometry without relying on external data priors. To address the limitations of conventional reconstruction algorithms, we propose a neural implicit representation for hair volume that encodes high-resolution 3D orientation and occupancy from input views. This implicit hair volume is trained with a new volumetric 3D orientation rendering algorithm, coupled with 2D orientation distribution supervision, to effectively prevent the loss of structural information caused by undesired orientation blending. We further propose a Gaussian-based hair optimization strategy to refine the traced hair strands with a novel chained Gaussian representation, utilizing direct photometric supervision from images. Our results demonstrate that GroomCap is able to capture high-quality hair geometries that are not only more precise and detailed than existing methods but also versatile enough for a range of applications.

Facial hair is a largely overlooked topic in facial performance capture. Most production pipelines in the entertainment industry do not have a way to automatically capture facial hair or track the skin underneath it. Thus, actors are asked to shave clean before face capture, which is very often undesirable. Capturing the geometry of individual facial hairs is very challenging, and their presence makes it harder to capture the deforming shape of the underlying skin surface. Some attempts have already been made at automating this task, but only for static faces with relatively sparse 3D hair reconstructions. In particular, current methods lack the temporal correspondence needed when capturing a sequence of video frames depicting facial performance. The problem of robustly tracking the skin underneath also remains unaddressed. In this paper, we propose the first multiview reconstruction pipeline that tracks both the dense 3D facial hair, as well as the underlying 3D skin for entire performances. Our method operates with standard setups for face photogrammetry, without requiring dense camera arrays. For a given capture subject, our algorithm first reconstructs a dense, high-quality neutral 3D facial hairstyle by registering sparser hair reconstructions over multiple frames that depict a neutral face under quasi-rigid motion. This custom-built, reference facial hairstyle is then tracked throughout a variety of changing facial expressions in a captured performance, and the result is used to constrain the tracking of the 3D skin surface underneath. We demonstrate the proposed capture pipeline on a variety of different facial hairstyles and lengths, ranging from sparse and short to dense full-beards.

For several decades, researchers have been advancing techniques for creating and rendering 3D digital faces, where a lot of the effort has gone into geometry and appearance capture, modeling and rendering techniques. This body of research work has largely focused on facial skin, with much less attention devoted to peripheral components like hair, eyes and the interior of the mouth. As a result, even with the best technology for facial capture and rendering, in most high-end productions a lot of artist time is still spent modeling the missing components and fine-tuning the rendering parameters to combine everything into photo-real digital renders. In this work we propose to combine incomplete, high-quality renderings showing only facial skin with recent methods for neural rendering of faces, in order to automatically and seamlessly create photo-realistic full-head portrait renders from captured data without the need for artist intervention. Our method begins with traditional face rendering, where the skin is rendered with the desired appearance, expression, viewpoint, and illumination. These skin renders are then projected into the latent space of a pre-trained neural network that can generate arbitrary photo-real face images (StyleGAN2). The result is a sequence of realistic face images that match the identity and appearance of the 3D character at the skin level, but is completed naturally with synthesized hair, eyes, inner mouth and surroundings. Notably, we present the first method for multi-frame consistent projection into this latent space, allowing photo-realistic rendering and preservation of the identity of the digital human over an animated performance sequence, which can depict different expressions, lighting conditions and viewpoints. Our method can be used in new face rendering pipelines and, importantly, in other deep learning applications that require large amounts of realistic training data with ground-truth 3D geometry, appearance maps, lighting, and viewpoint.