  Cloth simulation is an extensively studied problem, with a plethora of
solutions available in computer graphics literature. Existing cloth simulators
produce realistic cloth deformations that obey different types of boundary
conditions. Nevertheless, their operational principle remains limited in
several ways: They operate on explicit surface representations with a fixed
spatial resolution, perform a series of discretised updates (which bounds their
temporal resolution), and require comparably large amounts of storage.
Moreover, back-propagating gradients through the existing solvers is often not
straightforward, which poses additional challenges when integrating them into
modern neural architectures. In response to the limitations mentioned above,
this paper takes a fundamentally different perspective on physically-plausible
cloth simulation and re-thinks this long-standing problem: We propose
NeuralClothSim, i.e., a new cloth simulation approach using thin shells, in
which surface evolution is encoded in neural network weights. Our
memory-efficient and differentiable solver operates on a new continuous
coordinate-based representation of dynamic surfaces, i.e., neural deformation
fields (NDFs); it supervises NDF evolution with the rules of the non-linear
Kirchhoff-Love shell theory. NDFs are adaptive in the sense that they 1)
allocate their capacity to the deformation details as the latter arise during
the cloth evolution and 2) allow surface state queries at arbitrary spatial and
temporal resolutions without retraining. We show how to train our
NeuralClothSim solver while imposing hard boundary conditions and demonstrate
multiple applications, such as material interpolation and simulation editing.
The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our formulation and its
potential impact.

Graphics;Machine Learning