Collaborative Neural Rendering using Anime Character Sheets

Drawing images of characters at desired poses is an essential but laborious task in anime production. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Neural Rendering~(CoNR) method to create new images from a few arbitrarily posed reference images available in character sheets. In general, the high diversity of body shapes of anime characters defies the employment of universal body models for real-world humans, like SMPL. To overcome this difficulty, CoNR uses a compact and easy-to-obtain landmark encoding to avoid creating a unified UV mapping in the pipeline. In addition, CoNR's performance can be significantly increased when having multiple reference images by using feature space cross-view dense correspondence and warping in a specially designed neural network construct. Moreover, we collect a character sheet dataset containing over 700,000 hand-drawn and synthesized images of diverse poses to facilitate research in this area.