  We propose SplatArmor, a novel approach for recovering detailed and
animatable human models by `armoring' a parameterized body model with 3D
Gaussians. Our approach represents the human as a set of 3D Gaussians within a
canonical space, whose articulation is defined by extending the skinning of the
underlying SMPL geometry to arbitrary locations in the canonical space. To
account for pose-dependent effects, we introduce a SE(3) field, which allows us
to capture both the location and anisotropy of the Gaussians. Furthermore, we
propose the use of a neural color field to provide color regularization and 3D
supervision for the precise positioning of these Gaussians. We show that
Gaussian splatting provides an interesting alternative to neural rendering
based methods by leverging a rasterization primitive without facing any of the
non-differentiability and optimization challenges typically faced in such
approaches. The rasterization paradigms allows us to leverage forward skinning,
and does not suffer from the ambiguities associated with inverse skinning and
warping. We show compelling results on the ZJU MoCap and People Snapshot
datasets, which underscore the effectiveness of our method for controllable
human synthesis.
