CaPhy: Capturing Physical Properties for Animatable Human Avatars

We present CaPhy, a novel method for reconstructing animatable human avatars with realistic dynamic properties for clothing. Specifically, we aim for capturing the geometric and physical properties of the clothing from real observations. This allows us to apply novel poses to the human avatar with physically correct deformations and wrinkles of the clothing. To this end, we combine unsupervised training with physics-based losses and 3D-supervised training using scanned data to reconstruct a dynamic model of clothing that is physically realistic and conforms to the human scans. We also optimize the physical parameters of the underlying physical model from the scans by introducing gradient constraints of the physics-based losses. In contrast to previous work on 3D avatar reconstruction, our method is able to generalize to novel poses with realistic dynamic cloth deformations. Experiments on several subjects demonstrate that our method can estimate the physical properties of the garments, resulting in superior quantitative and qualitative results compared with previous methods.

DeepCloth: Neural Garment Representation for Shape and Style Editing

Garment representation, animation and editing is a challenging topic in the area of computer vision and graphics. Existing methods cannot perform smooth and reasonable garment transition under different shape styles and topologies. In this work, we introduce a novel method, termed as DeepCloth, to establish a unified garment representation framework enabling free and smooth garment style transition. Our key idea is to represent garment geometry by a "UV-position map with mask", which potentially allows the description of various garments with different shapes and topologies. Furthermore, we learn a continuous feature space mapped from the above UV space, enabling garment shape editing and transition by controlling the garment features. Finally, we demonstrate applications of garment animation, reconstruction and editing based on our neural garment representation and encoding method. To conclude, with the proposed DeepCloth, we move a step forward on establishing a more flexible and general 3D garment digitization framework. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art garment modeling results compared with the previous methods.

MulayCap: Multi-layer Human Performance Capture Using A Monocular Video Camera

We introduce MulayCap, a novel human performance capture method using a monocular video camera without the need for pre-scanning. The method uses "multi-layer" representations for geometry reconstruction and texture rendering, respectively. For geometry reconstruction, we decompose the clothed human into multiple geometry layers, namely a body mesh layer and a garment piece layer. The key technique behind is a Garment-from-Video (GfV) method for optimizing the garment shape and reconstructing the dynamic cloth to fit the input video sequence, based on a cloth simulation model which is effectively solved with gradient descent. For texture rendering, we decompose each input image frame into a shading layer and an albedo layer, and propose a method for fusing a fixed albedo map and solving for detailed garment geometry using the shading layer. Compared with existing single view human performance capture systems, our "multi-layer" approach bypasses the tedious and time consuming scanning step for obtaining a human specific mesh template. Experimental results demonstrate that MulayCap produces realistic rendering of dynamically changing details that has not been achieved in any previous monocular video camera systems. Benefiting from its fully semantic modeling, MulayCap can be applied to various important editing applications, such as cloth editing, re-targeting, relighting, and AR applications.