  With the booming of virtual reality (VR) technology, there is a growing need
for customized 3D avatars. However, traditional methods for 3D avatar modeling
are either time-consuming or fail to retain similarity to the person being
modeled. We present a novel framework to generate animatable 3D cartoon faces
from a single portrait image. We first transfer an input real-world portrait to
a stylized cartoon image with a StyleGAN. Then we propose a two-stage
reconstruction method to recover the 3D cartoon face with detailed texture,
which first makes a coarse estimation based on template models, and then
refines the model by non-rigid deformation under landmark supervision. Finally,
we propose a semantic preserving face rigging method based on manually created
templates and deformation transfer. Compared with prior arts, qualitative and
quantitative results show that our method achieves better accuracy, aesthetics,
and similarity criteria. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capability of
real-time facial animation of our 3D model.
