Inverse Garment and Pattern Modeling with a Differentiable Simulator

Abstract The capability to generate simulation‐ready garment models from 3D shapes of clothed people will significantly enhance the interpretability of captured geometry of real garments, as well as their faithful reproduction in the digital world. This will have notable impact on fields like shape capture in social VR, and virtual try‐on in the fashion industry. To align with the garment modeling process standardized by the fashion industry and cloth simulation software, it is required to recover 2D patterns, which are then placed around the wearer's body model and seamed prior to the draping simulation. This involves an inverse garment design problem, which is the focus of our work here: Starting with an arbitrary target garment geometry, our system estimates its animatable replica along with its corresponding 2D pattern. Built upon a differentiable cloth simulator, it runs an optimization process that is directed towards minimizing the deviation of the simulated garment shape from the target geometry, while maintaining desirable properties such as left‐to‐right symmetry. Experimental results on various real‐world and synthetic data show that our method outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods in producing both high‐quality garment models and accurate 2D patterns.