NeuralClothSim: Neural Deformation Fields Meet the Thin Shell Theory

Navami Kairanda, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik

Keywords: Neural field, implicit representation, cloth simulation, consistent simulation, multi-resolution, Kirchhoff-Love theory

TL;DR: We propose a new quasistatic cloth simulator using thin shells, in which surface deformation is encoded in neural network weights as a neural field.

Abstract: Despite existing 3D cloth simulators producing realistic results, they predominantly operate on discrete surface representations (e.g. points and meshes) with a fixed spatial resolution, which often leads to large memory consumption and resolution-dependent simulations. Moreover, back-propagating gradients through the existing solvers is difficult and they hence cannot be easily integrated into modern neural architectures. In response, this paper re-thinks physically plausible cloth simulation: We propose NeuralClothSim, i.e., a new quasistatic cloth simulator using thin shells, in which surface deformation is encoded in neural network weights in form of a neural field. Our memory-efficient solver operates on a new continuous coordinate-based surface representation called neural deformation fields (NDFs); it supervises NDF equilibria with the laws of the non-linear Kirchhoff-Love shell theory with a non-linear anisotropic material model. NDFs are adaptive: They 1) allocate their capacity to the deformation details and 2) allow surface state queries at arbitrary spatial resolutions without re-training. We show how to train NeuralClothSim while imposing hard boundary conditions and demonstrate multiple applications, such as material interpolation and simulation editing. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our continuous neural formulation.

Primary Area: Machine learning for physical sciences (for example: climate, physics)

Submission Number: 3211