HairDeck: Animation-Ready Stylized Hair Cards from a Single Image
Yuze He, Yixiang Wei, Wang Zhao, Chuhao Chen, Yanning Zhou, Yong-Jin Liu
This paper proposes a method to generate stylized hair cards from a single image, which can be animated and exported to downstream formats. Practitioners in the field of computer graphics and animation may care about this research as it can simplify the creation of stylized characters.
Abstract
The hair of stylized characters in games and avatars is built from hair cards: artist-placed ribbons whose geometry is the visible hair, animated by spring bones. Existing image-based methods produce realistic hair or a single fused mesh, while CHARM, the only generator of stylized hair cards, decodes a hairstyle autoregressively as a long sequence of control points. Observing that a card hairstyle is an unordered set of artist-defined primitives, we propose HairDeck, which generates it as one: each card is a single token, and a set diffusion transformer denoises all cards together. From a single image, HairDeck generates the cards and the spring-bone chains that drive them, yielding an animatable asset that exports to ready-to-use downstream formats. On CHARM's own test set, it lowers Chamfer distance by 44% and card-orientation error by more than half while running 33 times faster, and from single images it outperforms CHARM, image-to-3D pipelines and strand-based methods. Project page: https://hyzcluster.github.io/HairDeck