HAAR: Text-Conditioned Generative Model of 3D Strand-based Human Hairstyles

TL;DR

HAAR is a novel text-guided 3D hairstyle generation model that uses strand-based representations, enabling more detailed and occlusion-robust hair modeling suitable for graphics and simulation.

Contribution

This work introduces the first text-conditioned 3D hairstyle generator using strand-based representations and leverages 2D VQA for automatic annotation, surpassing prior 2D prior-based methods.

Findings

Outperforms existing hairstyle generation methods in qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Successfully generates detailed 3D hairstyles from textual descriptions.

Enables use in physics-based rendering and simulation pipelines.

Abstract

We present HAAR, a new strand-based generative model for 3D human hairstyles. Specifically, based on textual inputs, HAAR produces 3D hairstyles that could be used as production-level assets in modern computer graphics engines. Current AI-based generative models take advantage of powerful 2D priors to reconstruct 3D content in the form of point clouds, meshes, or volumetric functions. However, by using the 2D priors, they are intrinsically limited to only recovering the visual parts. Highly occluded hair structures can not be reconstructed with those methods, and they only model the ''outer shell'', which is not ready to be used in physics-based rendering or simulation pipelines. In contrast, we propose a first text-guided generative method that uses 3D hair strands as an underlying representation. Leveraging 2D visual question-answering (VQA) systems, we automatically annotate synthetic hair models that are generated from a small set of artist-created hairstyles. This allows us to train a latent diffusion model that operates in a common hairstyle UV space. In qualitative and quantitative studies, we demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed model and compare it to existing hairstyle generation approaches.