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Igor Santesteban
Research Scientist, PhD
Hi! I'm Igor, a Research Scientist working at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning, with particular emphasis on photorealistic human avatars and clothing animation.
I completed my PhD in Computer Graphics at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2018 – 2022), under the supervision of Dan Casas and Miguel A. Otaduy. My thesis, titled "Data-driven models of 3D avatars and clothing for virtual try-on", explores the use of machine learning architectures to animate clothes and soft bodies at a fraction of the cost of physics-based simulators.
More recently, I joined the Codec Avatar team at Meta (2024 – 2025), where I worked on creating photorealistic human avatars using novel rendering techniques such as Gaussian Splatting. My work also focused on scaling this technology to run efficiently on VR headsets.
Research
Publications at Meta
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Relightable Full-body Gaussian Codec Avatars
SIGGRAPH 2025 | Conference Papers
Shaofei Wang, Tomas Simon, Igor Santesteban, Timur Bagautdinov, Junxuan Li, Vasu Agrawal, Fabian Prada, Shoou-I Yu, Pace Nalbone, Matt Gramlich, Roman Lubachersky, Chenglei Wu, Javier Romero, Jason Saragih, Michael Zollhoefer, Andreas Geiger, Siyu Tang and Shunsuke Saito
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SqueezeMe: Mobile-Ready Distillation of Gaussian Full-Body Avatars
SIGGRAPH 2025 | Conference Papers
Forrest Iandola, Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Igor Santesteban, Divam Gupta, Anuj Pahuja, Nemanja Bartolovic, Frank Yu, Emanuel Garbin, Tomas Simon and Shunsuke Saito
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PGC: Physics-Based Gaussian Cloth from a Single Pose
CVPR 2025 | Highlight
Michelle Guo, Matt Jen-Yuan Chiang, Igor Santesteban, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Hsiao-yu Chen, Oshri Halimi, Aljaž Božič, Shunsuke Saito, Jiajun Wu, C. Karen Liu, Tuur Stuyck and Egor Larionov
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FRESA: Feedforward Reconstruction of Personalized Skinned Avatars from Few Images
CVPR 2025
Rong Wang, Fabian Prada, Ziyan Wang, Zhongshi Jiang, Chengxiang Yin, Junxuan Li, Shunsuke Saito, Igor Santesteban, Javier Romero, Rohan Joshi, Hongdong Li, Jason Saragih and Yaser Sheikh
Publications at URJC
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ULNeF: Untangled Layered Neural Fields for Mix-and-Match Virtual Try-On
NeurIPS 2022
Igor Santesteban, Nils Thuerey, Miguel A. Otaduy and Dan Casas
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SNUG: Self-Supervised Neural Dynamic Garments
CVPR 2022 | Oral presentation
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Self-Supervised Collision Handling via Generative 3D Garment Models for Virtual Try-On
CVPR 2021
Igor Santesteban, Nils Thuerey, Miguel A. Otaduy and Dan Casas
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Fully Convolutional Graph Neural Networks for Parametric Virtual Try-On
SCA 2020 | Computer Graphics Forum
Raquel Vidaurre, Igor Santesteban, Elena Garces and Dan Casas
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SoftSMPL: Data-driven Modeling of Nonlinear Soft-tissue Dynamics for Parametric Humans
Eurographics 2020 | Computer Graphics Forum
Igor Santesteban, Elena Garces, Miguel A. Otaduy and Dan Casas
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Learning-Based Animation of Clothing for Virtual Try-On
Eurographics 2019 | Computer Graphics Forum
Other projects
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Procedurally Generated Variations of a 3D Model
CEIG 2018 | Congreso Español de Informática Gráfica