# UNIC: Neural Garment Deformation Field for Real-time Clothed Character Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25580/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 109 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Learning to Simulate Complex Physics with Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09405/) (2020)
- [Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03409/) (2020)
- [DiffTaichi: Differentiable Programming for Physical Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00935/) (2019)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [SMPLicit: Topology-aware Generative Model for Clothed People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06871/) (2021)
- [TailorNet: Predicting Clothing in 3D as a Function of Human Pose, Shape and Garment Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04583/) (2020)
- [CLOTH3D: Clothed 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02792/) (2019)
- [MultiScale MeshGraphNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00612/) (2022)
- [DeepWrinkles: Accurate and Realistic Clothing Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03417/) (2018)
- [The Power of Points for Modeling Humans in Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01137/) (2021)
- [Learning-Based Animation of Clothing for Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07190/) (2019)
- [SNUG: Self-Supervised Neural Dynamic Garments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02219/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Collision Handling via Generative 3D Garment Models for Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06462/) (2021)
- [HOOD: Hierarchical Graphs for Generalized Modelling of Clothing Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07242/) (2022)
- [GarNet: A Two-Stream Network for Fast and Accurate 3D Cloth Draping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10983/) (2018)
- [DiffCloth: Differentiable Cloth Simulation with Dry Frictional Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05306/) (2021)
- [PBNS: Physically Based Neural Simulator for Unsupervised Garment Pose Space Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11310/) (2020)
- [DeepCloth: Neural Garment Representation for Shape and Style Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14619/) (2020)
- [4D-DRESS: A 4D Dataset of Real-world Human Clothing with Semantic Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18630/) (2024)
- [Learning a Shared Shape Space for Multimodal Garment Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11335/) (2018)
- [Learning Implicit Templates for Point-Based Clothed Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06955/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Graph Neural Networks for Parametric Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04592/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simulating physically realistic garment deformations is an essential task for virtual immersive experience, which is often achieved by physics simulation methods. However, these methods are typically time-consuming, computationally demanding, and require costly hardware, which is not suitable for real-time applications. Recent learning-based methods tried to resolve this problem by training graph neural networks to learn the garment deformation on vertices, which, however, fail to capture the intricate deformation of complex garment meshes with complex topologies. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural deformation field-based method, named UNIC, to animate the garments of an avatar in real time, given the motion sequences. Our key idea is to learn the instance-specific neural deformation field to animate the garment meshes. Such an instance-specific learning scheme does not require UNIC to generalize to new garments but only to new motion sequences, which greatly reduces the difficulty in training and improves the deformation quality. Moreover, neural deformation fields map the 3D points to their deformation offsets, which not only avoids handling topologies of the complex garments but also injects a natural smoothness constraint in the deformation learning. Extensive experiments have been conducted on various kinds of garment meshes to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of UNIC over baseline methods, making it potentially practical and useful in real-world interactive applications like video games.