SuperCarver: Texture-Consistent 3D Geometry Super-Resolution for High-Fidelity Surface Detail Generation

Traditional production workflow of high-precision 3D mesh assets necessitates a cumbersome and laborious process of manual sculpting by specialized modelers. The recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in AI-empowered 3D content creation. However, although the latest state-of-the-arts are already capable of generating plausible structures and intricate appearances from images or text prompts, the actual mesh surfaces are typically over-smoothing and lack geometric details. This paper introduces SuperCarver, a 3D geometry super-resolution framework particularly tailored for adding texture-consistent surface details to given coarse meshes. Technically, we start by rendering the original textured mesh into the image domain from multiple viewpoints. To achieve geometric detail generation, we develop a deterministic prior-guided normal diffusion model fine-tuned on a carefully curated dataset of paired low-poly and high-poly normal renderings. To optimize mesh structures from potentially imperfect normal map predictions, we design a simple yet effective noise-resistant inverse rendering scheme based on distance field deformation. Extensive experiments show that SuperCarver generates realistic and expressive surface details as depicted by specific texture appearances, making it a powerful tool for automatically upgrading massive outdated low-quality assets and shortening the iteration cycle of high-quality mesh production in practical applications.