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

We present DiT-Garment to model dynamic 3D clothing over human body models in arbitrary motion. Unlike existing methods, DiT-Garment can animate garments with unseen designs and physical materials, while allowing for direct inference of deformations for any target pose. To achieve this, we leverage a 2D diffusion transformer architecture to learn 3D deformations in a 2D UV-space. As the result is non-deterministic, our generative model learns the distribution of possible outcomes. The template garment is represented as a 3D triangle mesh spatially aligned with a 3D human body model in a standardized pose. To work with different garment designs without the need of a common template or complex graph convolution operations, the diffusion transformer is conditioned on a 3D position map of the template, represented in UV-space, which allows to implicitly learn a deformation of the 3D space around the body in standard pose. Further conditioning on body motion and physical parameters allows to physically ground the model. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate DiT-Garment on both synthetic and real data. While only trained on synthetic simulations of automatically generated cloth designs, our method generalizes to captured and artist-made garment designs. Code and data are available for research purposes at https://dumoulina.github.io/dit-garment/.

Recent advances in garment simulation have brought high-quality results closer to real-time performance. Physics-based simulators can produce accurate motion, but remain too computationally expensive for interactive applications. In contrast, linear blend skinning is efficient, but cannot capture the complex dynamics of loose-fitting garments, often leading to unrealistic motion and visual artifacts. Neural methods offer a promising alternative, yet they still struggle to animate loose clothing plausibly under strict runtime constraints. We present a fast and physically plausible approach for dynamic garment simulation. Our method trains a reduced-space neural dynamics simulator composed of independent coarse- and fine-level components. At the coarse level, the garment is driven by a set of virtual bones integrated with a lightweight neural network. Fine-scale wrinkle details are then recovered using a trained convolutional neural map. By decoupling identity-specific computation from real-time neural integration, our architecture maintains high performance while supporting diverse body shapes and motions. We further introduce an effective physics-supervision scheme that enables accurate results without relying on an external simulator. Experiments show that our method produces physically plausible garment dynamics, generalizes across a range of motions and body shapes, and supports a fixed set of garments. Our simulator runs at 300+ FPS on a commodity GPU, making it suitable for real-time applications.

Existing Gaussian avatar methods typically parameterize geometry on a body-template surface, which entangles the avatar's representation space with the template's deformation space and limits the capture of layered, off-body, and non-rigid clothing geometry. We present PiG-Avatar, which addresses this limitation by using the parametric body model solely for kinematic transport, while representing the avatar as Gaussians anchored in a volumetric canonical space governed by a continuous neural field. This decouples representation from template topology, avoiding the geometric constraints of surface-based parameterizations. Kinematic coherence is maintained through 3D barycentric anchor transport, which guides motion without constraining geometry and allows anchors to deviate freely from the template surface, yielding dense, stable temporal surface correspondences by construction. To make this unconstrained formulation tractable, we introduce dual-level spatially coherent optimization, combining Sobolev-preconditioned neural-field updates with a novel KNN-based preconditioning of canonical anchor geometry. Together, these mechanisms induce an emergent self-organization of anchor density: anchors migrate toward regions of high curvature, appearance variation, and non-coherent motion without explicit heuristics. As a result, complex clothing geometry and layered surfaces emerge as natural, high-fidelity outputs. This single representation further supports hierarchical reconstruction across multiple levels of detail, with coarse-level supervision propagating to finer levels through the shared field and coupled anchor graph. On established benchmarks featuring subjects with complex clothing and challenging non-rigid motion, PiG-Avatar achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, generalizes robustly to imperfect body model initialization, and renders in real time across all detail levels.