Garment simulation is fundamental to various applications in computer vision and graphics, from virtual try-on to digital human modelling. However, conventional physics-based methods remain computationally expensive, hindering their application in time-sensitive scenarios. While graph neural networks (GNNs) offer promising acceleration, existing approaches exhibit poor cross-resolution generalisation, demonstrating significant performance degradation on higher-resolution meshes beyond the training distribution. This stems from two key factors: (1) existing GNNs employ fixed message-passing depth that fails to adapt information aggregation to mesh density variation, and (2) vertex-wise displacement magnitudes are inherently resolution-dependent in garment simulation. To address these issues, we introduce Propagation-before-Update Graph Network (Pb4U-GNet), a resolution-adaptive framework that decouples message propagation from feature updates. Pb4U-GNet incorporates two key mechanisms: (1) dynamic propagation depth control, adjusting message-passing iterations based on mesh resolution, and (2) geometry-aware update scaling, which scales predictions according to local mesh characteristics. Extensive experiments show that even trained solely on low-resolution meshes, Pb4U-GNet exhibits strong generalisability across diverse mesh resolutions, addressing a fundamental challenge in neural garment simulation.

Animation production workflows centred around motion capture techniques require animators to edit motions based on a set of keyframes. However, most existing keyframe selection methods are optimisation-based, which suffer from the issues of flexibility and efficiency. In this paper, a novel deep reinforcement learning method with dual agents are proposed for unsupervised keyframe selection. First, an S-Agent and an R-Agent evaluate the actions of selection and refinement, respectively. A deep spatio-temporal network, namely graph keyframe evaluation network (GKEN), is proposed for the agents. Then, an animation specified reward is devised based on reconstruction, which fulfills three important properties of the animation workflow: incremental reward, order insensitivity and non-diminishing returns. During the inference, it is no longer necessary to compute the reconstruction, which significantly decreases the run-time latency. Experiments on the CMU MoCap dataset demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method without clearly compromising the effectiveness compared with the state-of-the-art methods. • A deep reinforcement learning with dual-agent to identify motion keyframes. • A spatio-temporal deep agent with graph convolutions and transformers. • Comprehensive experiments and human demonstrations for MoCap keyframing.

3D garment simulation is a critical component for producing cloth-based graphics. Recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a promising approach for efficient garment simulation. However, GNNs require extensive message-passing to propagate information such as physical forces and maintain contact awareness across the entire garment mesh, which becomes computationally inefficient at higher resolutions. To address this, we devise a novel GNN-based mesh learning framework with two key components to extend the message-passing range with minimal overhead, namely the Laplacian-Smoothed Dual Message-Passing (LSDMP) and the Geodesic Self-Attention (GSA) modules. LSDMP enhances message-passing with a Laplacian features smoothing process, which efficiently propagates the impact of each vertex to nearby vertices. Concurrently, GSA introduces geodesic distance embeddings to represent the spatial relationship between vertices and utilises attention mechanisms to capture global mesh information. The two modules operate in parallel to ensure both short- and long-range mesh modelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method, requiring fewer layers and lower inference latency.1

Sketch-based terrain generation seeks to create realistic landscapes for virtual environments in various applications such as computer games, animation and virtual reality. Recently, deep learning based terrain generation has emerged, notably the ones based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods often struggle to fulfill the requirements of flexible user control and maintain generative diversity for realistic terrain. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, namely terrain diffusion network (TDN), which actively incorporates user guidance for enhanced controllability, taking into account terrain features like rivers, ridges, basins, and peaks. Instead of adhering to a conventional monolithic denoising process, which often compromises the fidelity of terrain details or the alignment with user control, a multi-level denoising scheme is proposed to generate more realistic terrains by taking into account fine-grained details, particularly those related to climatic patterns influenced by erosion and tectonic activities. Specifically, three terrain synthesisers are designed for structural, intermediate, and fine-grained level denoising purposes, which allow each synthesiser concentrate on a distinct terrain aspect. Moreover, to maximise the efficiency of our TDN, we further introduce terrain and sketch latent spaces for the synthesizers with pre-trained terrain autoencoders. Comprehensive experiments on a new dataset constructed from NASA Topology Images clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/TDNResearch/TDN.

Deriving sophisticated 3D motions from sparse keyframes is a particularly challenging problem, due to continuity and exceptionally skeletal precision. The action features are often derivable accurately from the full series of keyframes, and thus, leveraging the global context with transformers has been a promising data-driven embedding approach. However, existing methods are often with inputs of interpolated intermediate frame for continuity using basic interpolation methods with keyframes, which result in a trivial local minimum during training. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to formulate latent motion manifolds with keyframe-based constraints, from which the continuous nature of intermediate token representations is considered. Particularly, our proposed framework consists of two stages for identifying a latent motion subspace, i.e., a keyframe encoding stage and an intermediate token generation stage, and a subsequent motion synthesis stage to extrapolate and compose motion data from manifolds. Through our extensive experiments conducted on both the LaFAN1 and CMU Mocap datasets, our proposed method demonstrates both superior interpolation accuracy and high visual similarity to ground truth motions.

Animation production workflows centred around motion capture techniques often require animators to edit the motion for various artistic and technical reasons. This process generally uses a set of keyframes. Unsupervised keyframe selection methods for motion capture sequences are highly demanded to reduce the laborious annotations. However, most existing methods are optimization-based, which cause the issues of flexibility and efficiency and eventually constrains the interactions and controls with animators. To address these limitations, we propose a novel graph based deep reinforcement learning method for efficient unsupervised keyframe selection. First, a reward function is devised in terms of reconstruction difference by comparing the original sequence and the interpolated sequence produced by the keyframes. The reward complies with the requirements of the animation pipeline satisfying: 1) incremental reward to evaluate the interpolated keyframes immediately; 2) order insensitivity for consistent evaluation; and 3) non-diminishing return for comparable rewards between optimal and sub-optimal solutions. Then by representing each skeleton frame as a graph, a graph-based deep agent is guided to heuristically select keyframes to maximize the reward. During the inference it is no longer necessary to estimate the reconstruction difference, and the evaluation time can be reduced significantly. The experimental results on the CMU Mocap dataset demonstrate that our proposed method is able to select keyframes at a high efficiency without clearly compromising the quality in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.