Explicit Frictional Contact Modeling in Neural Garment Simulation

Overview & Synopsis

Graph neural networks (GNNs) simulate garments efficiently through physics-based self-supervision, but leave body-garment friction implicit or inside training energies, with no friction coefficient $μ$ to set at inference; retraining the tested GNNs with a coefficient-specific friction term barely responds to $μ$. Optimization-based solvers decide each contact's stick-slip state from the reaction that governs it, but only by re-optimizing the garment state at every step; a friction term in a one-pass training objective acts as a fixed-weight penalty on sliding, and the trained weights apply no per-contact Coulomb condition at inference. We therefore resolve friction explicitly after prediction: a Modular Contact Operator, attached to a frozen predictor without retraining or an iterative solve, estimates the normal load, applies a closed-form Coulomb correction along a path across body triangles, and propagates the induced motion through the cloth as a linearized membrane wave. On HOOD and ContourCraft, it raises sticking and lowers slip monotonically in $μ$, tracking a reference solver's response while coefficient-specific retraining stays flat, with low penetration and reference-consistent stretching at an eighth of the solver's runtime.