Jiang, DiqiongJin, YiweiZhang, Fang‐LueLai, Yu‐KunDeng, RishengTong, RuofengTang, MinHauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre2022-10-112022-10-1120221467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14513https://diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.1111/cgf14513Many recent works have reconstructed distinctive 3D face shapes by aggregating shape parameters of the same identity and separating those of different people based on parametric models (e.g. 3D morphable models (3DMMs)). However, despite the high accuracy in the face recognition task using these shape parameters, the visual discrimination of face shapes reconstructed from those parameters remains unsatisfactory. Previous works have not answered the following research question: Do discriminative shape parameters guarantee visual discrimination in represented 3D face shapes? This paper analyses the relationship between shape parameters and reconstructed shape geometry, and proposes a novel shape identity‐aware regularization (SIR) loss for shape parameters, aiming at increasing discriminability in both the shape parameter and shape geometry domains. Moreover, to cope with the lack of training data containing both landmark and identity annotations, we propose a network structure and an associated training strategy to leverage mixed data containing either identity or landmark labels. In addition, since face recognition accuracy does not mean the recognizability of reconstructed face shapes from the shape parameters, we propose the SIR metric to measure the discriminability of face shapes. We compare our method with existing methods in terms of the reconstruction error, visual discriminability, and face recognition accuracy of the shape parameters and SIR metric. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art methods. The code will be released at .facial modellingmodelling10.1111/cgf.14513348-364