CartoonAlive: Towards Expressive Live2D Modeling from Single Portraits

With the rapid advancement of large foundation models, AIGC, cloud rendering, and real-time motion capture technologies, digital humans are now capable of achieving synchronized facial expressions and body movements, engaging in intelligent dialogues driven by natural language, and enabling the fast creation of personalized avatars. While current mainstream approaches to digital humans primarily focus on 3D models and 2D video-based representations, interactive 2D cartoon-style digital humans have received relatively less attention. Compared to 3D digital humans that require complex modeling and high rendering costs, and 2D video-based solutions that lack flexibility and real-time interactivity, 2D cartoon-style Live2D models offer a more efficient and expressive alternative. By simulating 3D-like motion through layered segmentation without the need for traditional 3D modeling, Live2D enables dynamic and real-time manipulation. In this technical report, we present CartoonAlive, an innovative method for generating high-quality Live2D digital humans from a single input portrait image. CartoonAlive leverages the shape basis concept commonly used in 3D face modeling to construct facial blendshapes suitable for Live2D. It then infers the corresponding blendshape weights based on facial keypoints detected from the input image. This approach allows for the rapid generation of a highly expressive and visually accurate Live2D model that closely resembles the input portrait, within less than half a minute. Our work provides a practical and scalable solution for creating interactive 2D cartoon characters, opening new possibilities in digital content creation and virtual character animation. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/CartoonAlive_webpage/.

Make-A-Character: High Quality Text-to-3D Character Generation within Minutes

There is a growing demand for customized and expressive 3D characters with the emergence of AI agents and Metaverse, but creating 3D characters using traditional computer graphics tools is a complex and time-consuming task. To address these challenges, we propose a user-friendly framework named Make-A-Character (Mach) to create lifelike 3D avatars from text descriptions. The framework leverages the power of large language and vision models for textual intention understanding and intermediate image generation, followed by a series of human-oriented visual perception and 3D generation modules. Our system offers an intuitive approach for users to craft controllable, realistic, fully-realized 3D characters that meet their expectations within 2 minutes, while also enabling easy integration with existing CG pipeline for dynamic expressiveness. For more information, please visit the project page at https://human3daigc.github.io/MACH/.