Self-supervised Garment Dynamics with Persistent Wrinkles

Self-supervised neural garment simulation has become popular due to its computational efficiency, good visual realism, and no reliance on training data. However, existing methods greatly simplify the mechanical properties of fabrics, ignoring persistent wrinkles caused by plasticity. Although this simplification allows for modeling of purely elastic material and simple training via energy minimization, the lack of believable wrinkles adversely affects the visual realism. Therefore, we introduce the first self-supervised neural garment simulator that explicitly models persistent wrinkles. This is accomplished through a novel physics-inspired loss function, which turns learning into a moving energy minimization problem to mimic plasticity. However, this requires learning to use a changing loss function, which causes difficulties in training because the loss function changes during optimization. To this end, we propose a new physics-inspired curriculum learning scheme where the target material for learning gradually changes from pure elasticity to elasto-plasticity, allowing the loss function and the learnable parameters to jointly converge. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we show that for the first time, self-supervised learning models can generate natural persistent wrinkles, outperforming existing methods on a variety of garments, body shapes, and body motions, according to a range of metrics.