Cloth and Skin Deformation with a Triangle Mesh Based Convolutional Neural Network

• Published in: Computer graphics forum 2020-12, Vol.39 (8), p.123-134
• Main Authors: Chentanez, Nuttapong, Macklin, Miles, Müller, Matthias, Jeschke, Stefan, Kim, Tae‐Yong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; Bones; CCS Concepts; Cloth; Computing methodologies → Physical simulation; Deformation; Finite element method; Inference; Neural networks; Principal components analysis; Regression analysis; Simulation; Triangles
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.14107

We introduce a triangle mesh based convolutional neural network. The proposed network structure can be used for problems where input and/or output are defined on a manifold triangle mesh with or without boundary. We demonstrate its applications in cloth upsampling, adding back details to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) compressed cloth, regressing clothing deformation from character poses, and regressing hand skin deformation from bones' joint angles. The data used for training in this work are generated from high resolution extended position based dynamics (XPBD) physics simulations with small time steps and high iteration counts and from an offline FEM simulator, but it can come from other sources. The inference time of our prototype implementation, depending on the mesh resolution and the network size, can provide between 4 to 134 times faster than a GPU based simulator. The inference also only needs to be done for meshes currently visible by the camera.