HairDeck generates animatable stylized hair cards from a single image, cutting Chamfer distance 44%

[HF Papers] Hair on stylized game and avatar characters is built from hair cards, artist-placed ribbons whose geometry is the visible hair and which are animated by spring bones, according to the paper HairDeck. Existing image-based methods produce realistic hair or a single fused mesh; CHARM, described by the authors as the only prior generator of stylized hair cards, decodes a hairstyle autoregressively as a long sequence of control points. Treating a card hairstyle as an unordered set of artist-defined primitives, the authors propose HairDeck, which represents each card as a single token and uses a set diffusion transformer to denoise all cards together. From a single image it generates the cards and the spring-bone chains that drive them, yielding an animatable asset that exports to downstream formats. According to the authors, on CHARM's own test set it lowers Chamfer distance by 44% and card-orientation error by more than half while running 33 times faster, and from single images it outperforms CHARM, image-to-3D pipelines and strand-based methods. The work is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.