How to Build Digital Humans? From Priors to Photorealistic Avatars
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Date
2026
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
This state-of-the-art report provides an overview of controllable 3D human avatar creation. We describe current 3D avatar systems, which typically consist of three stages: (i) learning priors of human appearance and motion, (ii) creating a personalized avatar, and (iii) animating the avatar. To limit the scope, we focus on the prior learning and avatar creation stages. We define current avatar representations and introduce a taxonomy that categorizes existing work along multiple axes, including body regions and employed priors. We review methods for full-body and head avatars, as well as layered representations that decompose the body into components such as hands, hair, and garments. Finally, we outline common underlying principles, reference key literature for newcomers, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.
Description
@article{10.1111:cgf.70395,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{How to Build Digital Humans? From Priors to Photorealistic Avatars}},
author = {Zielonka, Wojciech and Kirschstein, Tobias and Thies, Justus and Bolkart, Timo and Giebenhain, Simon and Sklyarova, Vanessa and Deng, Xiang and Xiang, Donglai and Saito, Shunsuke and Liu, Yebin and Niessner, Matthias},
year = {2026},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.70395}
}