Cloth Simulation Project Report: Numerical Methods for PDEs

The goal of this project was to implement and study cloth-simulation. Cloth simulation is a subject of significant interest to the Computer Graphics (CG) community. This project was specifically based on the work in [1] and a lot of concepts are also based on [2]. CG characters need to wear clothes, which in-turn need to be animated to make the clothing look realistic. Since clothes don’t have active controllers built in, their behavior can classified as being passive response to the environment. This means that behavior of cloth is relatively well-defined once the external forces acting on the cloth are known as opposed to say a human who can exert forces and torques to control his/her motion as desired. The modelling of such passive systems is best accomplished through physicsbased simulation. The variability in the motion of a cloth comes only from a set of stationary material properties. Among these, the properties most pertinent to motion are the stretch, compression and bending resistance/response of the cloth. Most types of cloth have a strong resistance to stretch, where as they buckle (fold over) very easily when subject to compressive forces. Mathematically, this behavior can be expressed as a partial differential equation of the following form (see [2] for details):