This paper proposes an anchor-based deformation model, namely AnchorDEF, to predict 3D garment animation from a body motion sequence. It deforms a garment mesh template by a mixture of rigid transformations with extra nonlinear displacements. A set of anchors around the mesh surface is introduced to guide the learning of rigid transformation matrices. Once the anchor transformations are found, per-vertex nonlinear displacements of the garment template can be regressed in a canonical space, which reduces the complexity of deformation space learning. By explicitly constraining the transformed anchors to satisfy the consistencies of position, normal and direction, the physical meaning of learned anchor transformations in space is guaranteed for better generalization. Furthermore, an adaptive anchor updating is proposed to optimize the anchor position by being aware of local mesh topology for learning representative anchor transformations. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on different types of garments demonstrate that AnchorDEF achieves the state-of-the-art performance on 3D garment deformation prediction in motion, especially for loose-fitting garments.