  We, humans, are entering into a virtual era and indeed want to bring animals
to the virtual world as well for companion. Yet, computer-generated (CGI) furry
animals are limited by tedious off-line rendering, let alone interactive motion
control. In this paper, we present ARTEMIS, a novel neural modeling and
rendering pipeline for generating ARTiculated neural pets with appEarance and
Motion synthesIS. Our ARTEMIS enables interactive motion control, real-time
animation, and photo-realistic rendering of furry animals. The core of our
ARTEMIS is a neural-generated (NGI) animal engine, which adopts an efficient
octree-based representation for animal animation and fur rendering. The
animation then becomes equivalent to voxel-level deformation based on explicit
skeletal warping. We further use a fast octree indexing and efficient
volumetric rendering scheme to generate appearance and density features maps.
Finally, we propose a novel shading network to generate high-fidelity details
of appearance and opacity under novel poses from appearance and density feature
maps. For the motion control module in ARTEMIS, we combine state-of-the-art
animal motion capture approach with recent neural character control scheme. We
introduce an effective optimization scheme to reconstruct the skeletal motion
of real animals captured by a multi-view RGB and Vicon camera array. We feed
all the captured motion into a neural character control scheme to generate
abstract control signals with motion styles. We further integrate ARTEMIS into
existing engines that support VR headsets, providing an unprecedented immersive
experience where a user can intimately interact with a variety of virtual
animals with vivid movements and photo-realistic appearance. We make available
our ARTEMIS model and dynamic furry animal dataset at
https://haiminluo.github.io/publication/artemis/.
