arXiv subjects

Philipp Herholz

Publications and source records attributed to Philipp Herholz.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

HyperBones: Realtime Bone-driven Neural Garment Simulation with Hypernetwork Conditioning

Recent advances in cloth simulation have led to accurate garment physics, but the methods are computationally expensive for real-time applications. In contrast, Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) is efficient, but cannot capture the complex dynamics of loose-fitting garments, 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-informed framework for dynamic garment simulation, consisting of a reduced-space neural dynamics simulator with independent coarse and fine-level components. At the coarse level, the garment is driven by virtual bones integrated with a lightweight neural network for predicting corrections over LBS. Fine-scale wrinkle details are then recovered using a convolutional MLP defined in UV space. By decoupling identity-specific computation from shape conditioning via hypernetwork, our neural framework offers high performance, trained using an effective physics-based self-supervised training paradigm without relying on an offline simulator. Experiments show that our method produces physically plausible garment dynamics, generalizes across diverse motions and unseen body shapes, and delivers over 30x speedup compared to state-of-the-art autoregressive neural simulators, achieving interactive inference at ~1 ms per frame on a consumer GPU.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

Retrofitting Existing 3D Objects with Surface-Conforming Capacitive Sensing

Augmenting the surface of 3D objects with capacitive sensing is challenging when their volumes cannot be modified. In this paper, we present a generative computational fabrication pipeline that retrofits surface-only sensor layouts to 3D geometries for multi-touch interaction. Our method scans a real-world object to obtain its 3D mesh, generates and optimizes a 3D sensor design of drive and sense lines for mutual-capacitance sensing under physical and hardware constraints, and unfolds the design into individual 2D stencils that can be cut from conductive material. Our fabrication pipeline cuts these stencils from thin copper foil with a vinyl cutter and then assists manual sensor attachment by projecting the sensor design onto the dynamically registered real-world object. We connect the resulting electrode mesh to a mutual-capacitance scanning controller and resolve touch interaction in real time. We demonstrate our approach with four 3D geometries and evaluate our method and fabrication pipeline on them.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Higher Order Continuity for Smooth As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Modeling

We propose a modification of the As-Rigid-As-Possible (ARAP) mesh deformation energy with higher order smoothness, which overcomes a prominent limitation of the original ARAP formulation: spikes and lack of continuity at the manipulation handles. Our method avoids spikes even when using single-point positional constraints. Since no explicit rotations have to be specified, the user interaction can be realized through a simple click-and-drag interface, where points on the mesh can be selected and moved around while the rest of the mesh surface automatically deforms accordingly. Our method preserves the benefits of ARAP deformations: it is easy to implement and thus useful for practical applications, while its efficiency makes it usable in real-time, interactive scenarios on detailed models.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2026

PhySkin: Physics-based Bone-driven Neural Garment Simulation

Recent advances in digital avatar technology have enabled the generation of compelling virtual characters, but deploying these avatars on compute-constrained devices poses significant challenges for achieving realistic garment deformations. While physics-based simulations yield accurate results, they are computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Conversely, linear blend skinning offers efficiency but fails to capture the complex dynamics of loose-fitting garments, resulting in unrealistic motion and visual artifacts. Neural methods have shown promise, yet they struggle to animate loose clothing plausibly under strict performance constraints. In this work, we present a novel approach for fast and physically plausible garment draping tailored for resource-constrained environments. Our method leverages a reduced-space quasi-static neural simulation, mapping the garment's full degrees of freedom to a set of bone handles that drive deformation. A neural deformation model is trained in a fully self-supervised manner, eliminating the need for costly simulation data. At runtime, a lightweight neural network modulates the handle deformations based on body shape and pose, enabling realistic garment behavior that respects physical properties such as gravity, fabric stretching, bending, and collision avoidance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves physically plausible garment drapes while generalizing across diverse poses and body shapes, supporting zero-shot evaluation and mesh topology independence. Our method's runtime significantly outperforms past works, as it runs in microseconds per frame using single-threaded CPU inference, offering a practical solution for real-time avatar animation on low-compute devices.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

SkinCells: Sparse Skinning using Voronoi Cells

For decades, real-time skinning has been the cornerstone of character animation in visual effects and games. Despite its importance, the creation of animatable digital assets remains a labor-intensive manual process. Existing automated tools frequently struggle with intricate geometries, often necessitating significant manual refinement to reach production standards. We present a robust, fully automated method for generating high-quality skinning weights from a standard mesh and skeleton in a canonical A- or T-pose. Unlike traditional approaches, our framework offers direct sparsity controls to limit bone influences per vertex -- a critical requirement for maintaining performance in large-scale mobile environments. Furthermore, we address the challenge of Level-of-Detail (LoD) management by optimizing weights within a continuous spatial volume rather than on discrete vertices. This allows a single optimization pass to be applied seamlessly across multiple asset resolutions and variations. Central to our approach is a novel parameterized family of functions, we call SkinCells. We demonstrate that our method consistently produces stable, high-quality results even in complex scenarios where standard biharmonic weight computations fail.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2025

TetWeave: Isosurface Extraction using On-The-Fly Delaunay Tetrahedral Grids for Gradient-Based Mesh Optimization

We introduce TetWeave, a novel isosurface representation for gradient-based mesh optimization that jointly optimizes the placement of a tetrahedral grid used for Marching Tetrahedra and a novel directional signed distance at each point. TetWeave constructs tetrahedral grids on-the-fly via Delaunay triangulation, enabling increased flexibility compared to predefined grids. The extracted meshes are guaranteed to be watertight, two-manifold and intersection-free. The flexibility of TetWeave enables a resampling strategy that places new points where reconstruction error is high and allows to encourage mesh fairness without compromising on reconstruction error. This leads to high-quality, adaptive meshes that require minimal memory usage and few parameters to optimize. Consequently, TetWeave exhibits near-linear memory scaling relative to the vertex count of the output mesh - a substantial improvement over predefined grids. We demonstrate the applicability of TetWeave to a broad range of challenging tasks in computer graphics and vision, such as multi-view 3D reconstruction, mesh compression and geometric texture generation.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2023

PhysGraph: Physics-Based Integration Using Graph Neural Networks

Physics-based simulation of mesh based domains remains a challenging task. State-of-the-art techniques can produce realistic results but require expert knowledge. A major bottleneck in many approaches is the step of integrating a potential energy in order to compute velocities or displacements. Recently, learning based method for physics-based simulation have sparked interest with graph based approaches being a promising research direction. One of the challenges for these methods is to generate models that are mesh independent and generalize to different material properties. Moreover, the model should also be able to react to unforeseen external forces like ubiquitous collisions. Our contribution is based on a simple observation: evaluating forces is computationally relatively cheap for traditional simulation methods and can be computed in parallel in contrast to their integration. If we learn how a system reacts to forces in general, irrespective of their origin, we can learn an integrator that can predict state changes due to the total forces with high generalization power. We effectively factor out the physical model behind resulting forces by relying on an opaque force module. We demonstrate that this idea leads to a learnable module that can be trained on basic internal forces of small mesh patches and generalizes to different mesh typologies, resolutions, material parameters and unseen forces like collisions at inference time. Our proposed paradigm is general and can be used to model a variety of physical phenomena. We focus our exposition on the detail enhancement of coarse clothing geometry which has many applications including computer games, virtual reality and virtual try-on.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2022

Designing Personalized Garments with Body Movement

The standardized sizes used in the garment industry do not cover the range of individual differences in body shape for most people, leading to ill-fitting clothes, high return rates and overproduction. Recent research efforts in both industry and academia therefore focus on virtual try-on and on-demand fabrication of individually fitting garments. We propose an interactive design tool for creating custom-fit garments based on 3D body scans of the intended wearer. Our method explicitly incorporates transitions between various body poses to ensure a better fit and freedom of movement. The core of our method focuses on tools to create a 3D garment shape directly on an avatar without an underlying sewing pattern, and on the adjustment of that garment's rest shape while interpolating and moving through the different input poses. We alternate between cloth simulation and rest shape adjustment based on stretch to achieve the final shape of the garment. At any step in the real-time process, we allow for interactive changes to the garment. Once the garment shape is finalized for production, established techniques can be used to parameterize it into a 2D sewing pattern or transform it into a knitting pattern.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2022

Sparsity-Specific Code Optimization using Expression Trees

We introduce a code generator that converts unoptimized C++ code operating on sparse data into vectorized and parallel CPU or GPU kernels. Our approach unrolls the computation into a massive expression graph, performs redundant expression elimination, grouping, and then generates an architecture-specific kernel to solve the same problem, assuming that the sparsity pattern is fixed, which is a common scenario in many applications in computer graphics and scientific computing. We show that our approach scales to large problems and can achieve speedups of two orders of magnitude on CPUs and three orders of magnitude on GPUs, compared to a set of manually optimized CPU baselines. To demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach, we employ it to optimize popular algorithms with applications to physical simulation and interactive mesh deformation.

cs.PL↗