ZurichCV #12
Tue 20 Jan
|ETH AI Center
Zan Gojcic (NVIDIA) on Generative Reconstruction and Vanessa Sklyarova (ETH) on Hairstyle Modelling for Avatars.


Time & Location
20 Jan 2026, 18:00 – 20:00
ETH AI Center, OAT ETH Zurich (19th floor), Andreasstrasse 5, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland
About the Event
Zan Gojcic (NVIDIA): From Reconstruction and Generation to Generative Reconstruction
Neural reconstruction has traditionally focused on faithfully recovering geometry and appearance from posed real-world images, while large generative models have excelled at synthesizing realistic content beyond the constraints of captured data. Recently, this distinction has begun to blur. Neural reconstruction methods are increasingly learned on large datasets and benefit from powerful generative priors, while the advances in conditioning on sparse observations and camera control have made video generative modeling strong candidates for novel view synthesis. This raises fundamental questions: Are reconstruction and generation on the brink of convergence? Do we still need explicit scene representations? And is reconstruction ultimately a strongly conditioned generative problem?
Download the Slides
Vanessa Sklyarova (ETH): Modeling Realistic Hairstyles for Digital Human Avatars While 3D avatar creation has advanced rapidly, realistic hair remains a bottleneck. Current methods using meshes or implicit surfaces often lack the physical realism required…