Physically-Aware Generative Network for 3D Shape Modeling

Mariem Mezghanni, Malika Boulkenafed, Andre Lieutier, Maks Ovsjanikov; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 9330-9341

Shapes are often designed to satisfy structural properties and serve a particular functionality in the physical world. Unfortunately, most existing generative models focus primarily on the geometric or visual plausibility, ignoring the physical or structural constraints. To remedy this, we present a novel method aimed to endow deep generative models with physical reasoning. In particular, we introduce a loss and a learning framework that promote two key characteristics of the generated shapes: their connectivity and physical stability. The former ensures that each generated shape consists of a single connected component, while the latter promotes the stability of that shape when subjected to gravity. Our proposed physical losses are fully differentiable and we demonstrate their use in end-to-end learning. Crucially we demonstrate that such physical objectives can be achieved without sacrificing the expressive power of the model and variability of the generated results. We demonstrate through extensive comparisons with the state-of-the-art deep generative models, the utility and efficiency of our proposed approach, while avoiding the potentially costly differentiable physical simulation at training time.