
Anime-to-Real Clothing: Cosplay Costume Generation - polm23
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11479
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vinodc
I had to google "cosplay market size" to confirm, but the paper's assertion
that it's a billion-dollar industry does appear to be correct (!)

Two of the paper's authors work at the technology arm of Zozotown, one of
Japan's largest fashion e-commerce sites, which points to how this could have
practical benefits.

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Melting_Harps
> I had to google "cosplay market size" to confirm, but the paper's assertion
> that it's a billion-dollar industry does appear to be correct (!)

It's a thing, I'm taking remote classes now and some seemingly 20 somethings
are taking the time to dress up more and more in cosplay attire for them.

I'm all for it as I grew up in the 90s, alongside various Japanese sub-
cultures that involved anime/manga, but I admit it is kind of hard to see a
lolita with a goth background at 8am lecture for linear algebra or something.

I'd prefer to see it in person, as seeing a cosplay girl online is become
blase to me, and would prefer to see if they could pull look off in the summer
heat or winter snow.

I frequented a night club before this pandemic where it was typical that
dressing for the occasion meant cosplaying to some degree, which meant
Halloween was always over-the-top.

Capitalizing on this market is pretty interesting, so many DIYers (some even
on hack-a-day inspiration streaks) have become the default for difficult to
make things like armour, weapons and helmets. I'm not sure how grass-roots it
is anymore, but when I cared to look there were lots of social media posts on
sites like Deviant art about their current projects and signups for pre-
buys/groupbuys. I'm not sure the West has caught up to Japan's boutique
clothing stores that cater to a specific genre of anime quote yet, but I can
see there being an incentive now that it is or exceeds being a billion dollar
Industry.

If you're interested, this is pretty much the main-plot to a J-movie from the
early 2000s called Kamikaze Girls [1], funny movie.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTLkz7DRIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTLkz7DRIQ)

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userbinator
_It 's a thing, I'm taking remote classes now and some seemingly 20 somethings
are taking the time to dress up more and more in cosplay attire for them._

Course _instructors_ wearing cosplay?

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Melting_Harps
Students.

Hence the _20-something_ part.

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totetsu
For some reason I expected this to be from anime image to costume sewing
pattern.

~~~
Animats
Right. What it really does is take an image of a character in an arbitrary,
but mostly standing, position, and returns an image in a standard resting
stand position. This is neat, but costume generation is several steps past
that.

Now, if you could take a collection of pictures of a character from anime and
get a 3D model you could feed a fashion CAD system, that would be impressive.

There is CAD for fashion, and it's very good.[1] The CAD systems understand
cloth physics quite well now. A machine learning system which takes a set of
pictures of a character in different poses and tries to make clothing which
matches would be a useful achievement. It's a big job, but probably do-able.
The problem is reasonably convex. If you have a character in a dress, and you
start with a generic dress in the CAD system, you can keep tweaking parameters
and textures until it matches. The ML system doesn't have to invent a 3D
dress, just keep tweaking a basic form.

[1] [https://clo3d.com/](https://clo3d.com/)

~~~
bsder
> The CAD systems understand cloth physics quite well now.

Is this actually true?

Energy distribution in draping cloth is a stiff differential equation system
with multiple time constants--a _very_ difficult system to simulate.

We have some decent heuristics that kinda make things work. (The pictures from
the link you provided look like those heuristics to my eye). And in fashion
they may actually be "good enough".

But I haven't seen a genuine advance in computer science/graphics for
simulating realistic cloth other than "stupid amounts of compute". I'm willing
to be corrected if somebody has references.

Edit: Looking at this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7UzwB6MbU&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7UzwB6MbU&feature=youtu.be)

Heuristics with low-density point cloud are in operation--which, as I point
out, may actually be fine for fashion.

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trynumber9
Code:
[https://github.com/tan5o/anime2clothing](https://github.com/tan5o/anime2clothing)

~~~
dgellow
A Jupyter notebook is available here:
[https://github.com/tan5o/anime2clothing/blob/master/Anime2Cl...](https://github.com/tan5o/anime2clothing/blob/master/Anime2Clothing_DEMO.ipynb)

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krzat
A bit offtopic, but my fear with these AI systems is that they will create
"Discovery channel" effect in other areas - replace fewer good quality items,
with a flood of passable AI generated alternatives, making good quality stuff
harder to get. Hope I'm wrong.

~~~
ThePadawan
From what I've seen this is mostly already the state of the cosplay industry,
except the AI part:

* Some big Chinese manufacturers start drafting the easiest way to get a passable-enough version of an outfit to sell on aliexpress for <$50 in time for Halloween /convention season.

* Fans come up with sewing patterns and jewelry sources on their own (a manual process).

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dwheeler
This is a cool application, but I was left unimpressed with the final results
shown in the paper. It's intriguing that it works at all, yes. But look at the
pants and skirts... there is a lot of detail in the original that is lost or
obviously distorted in the generated images. Am I expecting too much?

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Hamuko
Yeah, I'm failing to see any results here that actually match the original.
Sure, they get it impressively close considering the source and the process,
but I don't think any of this is actually something that anyone would want to
buy.

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justinclift
And it's not "real clothing". It just pictures that look like they could be of
real clothes.

Seems pretty misleading to me. :(

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ReactiveJelly
Couldn't they have un-squished the images for the PDF? It just looks it
rendered wrong.

~~~
Kuinox
It squish the image like that sadly.

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Kuinox
I tried to run on a dozen character, with a nice white background, without
sucess, the output is a mess, but respect the color theme...

