Cloth Animation with Self-Collision Detection

This paper addresses the problem of detecting collisions of very flexible objects, such as clothes with almost rigid bodies, such as human bodies. In our method, collision avoidance consists of creating a very thin force field around the obstacle surface to avoid collisions. This force field acts like a shield rejecting the points. This volume is divided into small contiguous non-overlapped cells which completely surround the surface. As soon as a point enters into a cell, a repulsive force is applied. The direction and the magnitude of this force are dependent on the velocities, the normals and the distance between the point and the surface. Particular cases are discussed with the ways of solving them. We also briefly present various approaches for simulating flexible objects and the difficulties, due to the numerical methods of solving the differential equations involved. Finally, we briefly describe the implementation of our software for creating and animating clothes.