Interactive Assembly and Animation of 3D Digital Garments

We present a novel real-time tool for sewing together 2D patterns, enabling quick assembly of visually plausible, interactively animated garments for virtual characters. The process is assisted by ad-hoc visual hints and allows designers to import 2D patterns from any CAD-tool, connect them using seams around a 3D character with any body type, and assess the overall quality during the character animation. The cloth is numerically simulated including robust modeling of contact of the cloth with itself and with the character\u27s body. Overall, our tool allows for fast prototyping of virtual garments, achieving immediate feedback on their behaviour and visual quality on an animated character, in effect speeding up the content production pipeline for visual effects applications involving clothed characters

Real-time simulation and visualisation of cloth using edge-based adaptive meshes

Real-time rendering and the animation of realistic virtual environments and characters has progressed at a great pace, following advances in computer graphics hardware in the last decade. The role of cloth simulation is becoming ever more important in the quest to improve the realism of virtual environments. The real-time simulation of cloth and clothing is important for many applications such as virtual reality, crowd simulation, games and software for online clothes shopping. A large number of polygons are necessary to depict the highly exible nature of cloth with wrinkling and frequent changes in its curvature. In combination with the physical calculations which model the deformations, the effort required to simulate cloth in detail is very computationally expensive resulting in much diffculty for its realistic simulation at interactive frame rates. Real-time cloth simulations can lack quality and realism compared to their offline counterparts, since coarse meshes must often be employed for performance reasons. The focus of this thesis is to develop techniques to allow the real-time simulation of realistic cloth and clothing. Adaptive meshes have previously been developed to act as a bridge between low and high polygon meshes, aiming to adaptively exploit variations in the shape of the cloth. The mesh complexity is dynamically increased or refined to balance quality against computational cost during a simulation. A limitation of many approaches is they do not often consider the decimation or coarsening of previously refined areas, or otherwise are not fast enough for real-time applications. A novel edge-based adaptive mesh is developed for the fast incremental refinement and coarsening of a triangular mesh. A mass-spring network is integrated into the mesh permitting the real-time adaptive simulation of cloth, and techniques are developed for the simulation of clothing on an animated character

From early draping to haute couture models: 20 years of research

Simulating the complex fashion garments of haute couture can only be reached through an optimal combination of modeling techniques and numerical methods that combines high computation efficiency with the versatility required for simulating intricate garment designs. Here we describe optimal choices illustrated by their integration into a design and simulation tool that allow interactive prototyping of garments along drape motion and comfortability tests on animated postures. These techniques have been successfully used to bring haute couture garments from early draping of fashion designers, to be simulated and visualized in the virtual worl

RECREATING AND SIMULATING DIGITAL COSTUMES FROM A STAGE PRODUCTION OF \u3ci\u3eMEDEA\u3c/i\u3e

This thesis investigates a technique to effectively construct and simulate costumes from a stage production Medea, in a dynamic cloth simulation application like Maya\u27s nDynamics. This was done by using data collected from real-world fabric tests and costume construction in the theatre\u27s costume studio. Fabric tests were conducted and recorded, by testing costume fabrics for drape and behavior with two collision objects. These tests were recreated digitally in Maya to derive appropriate parameters for the digital fabric, by comparing with the original reference. Basic mannequin models were created using the actors\u27 measurements and skeleton-rigged to enable animation. The costumes were then modeled and constrained according to the construction process observed in the costume studio to achieve the same style and stitch as the real costumes. Scenes selected and recorded from Medea were used as reference to animate the actors\u27 models. The costumes were assigned the parameters derived from the fabric tests to produce the simulations. Finally, the scenes were lit and rendered out to obtain the final videos which were compared to the original recordings to ascertain the accuracy of simulation. By obtaining and refining simulation parameters from simple fabric collision tests, and modeling the digital costumes following the procedures derived from real-life costume construction, realistic costume simulation was achieved

3D virtual prototyping of a ski jumpsuit based on a reconstructed body scan model

3D virtual prototyping become a topic of increasing interest of both computer graphics and computer-aided design for apparel production. These technologies are especially important when a garment prototype should be developed for a special purpose, such as ski-jumper suit. Namely, shape and size of a jumpsuit need to be individually adapted to each ski-jumper according to the exact requirements set by FIS (Fédereation Internationale de Ski). The FIS requirements change annually or even more often in order to assure ski-jumpers\u27 safety during competitive ski jumps. The conventional body measurement technique and development of ski-jumpers pattern are time consuming. In order to develop an accurate and rapid design, as well as an adaptable and quickly changeable jumpsuit, different modern technologies were used. The obtained virtual prototypes of a skijumper and a jumpsuit enable both - fast re-modelling according to FIS rules and expeditious development and/or simulations of a jumpsuit. All these measures are taken to improve the aerodynamic design of a suit and jumper\u27s result. The body scanning technology represents a great potential for textile industries and above all for producers of garments. It enables fast and reliable capture of 3D body data and extraction of precise measurements needed for design, construction, visualisation and animation of garments on virtual mannequins. However, there are also some problems related to the scanned body models, caused by the scanning technique. In this article we are discussing the techniques for reconstruction of the body models and its results using the example from one of the competitive sports clothing - ski-jumper suit. In our study we have used different computer graphics programmes in order to reconstruct and prepare the 3D body scan model for successfully importing it into OptiTex CAD programme. The aim of this research was to enable effective 3D virtual garment prototyping using the reconstructed body scan model

NeuralClothSim: Neural Deformation Fields Meet the Kirchhoff-Love Thin Shell Theory

Cloth simulation is an extensively studied problem, with a plethora of solutions available in computer graphics literature. Existing cloth simulators produce realistic cloth deformations that obey different types of boundary conditions. Nevertheless, their operational principle remains limited in several ways: They operate on explicit surface representations with a fixed spatial resolution, perform a series of discretised updates (which bounds their temporal resolution), and require comparably large amounts of storage. Moreover, back-propagating gradients through the existing solvers is often not straightforward, which poses additional challenges when integrating them into modern neural architectures. In response to the limitations mentioned above, this paper takes a fundamentally different perspective on physically-plausible cloth simulation and re-thinks this long-standing problem: We propose NeuralClothSim, i.e., a new cloth simulation approach using thin shells, in which surface evolution is encoded in neural network weights. Our memory-efficient and differentiable solver operates on a new continuous coordinate-based representation of dynamic surfaces, i.e., neural deformation fields (NDFs); it supervises NDF evolution with the rules of the non-linear Kirchhoff-Love shell theory. NDFs are adaptive in the sense that they 1) allocate their capacity to the deformation details as the latter arise during the cloth evolution and 2) allow surface state queries at arbitrary spatial and temporal resolutions without retraining. We show how to train our NeuralClothSim solver while imposing hard boundary conditions and demonstrate multiple applications, such as material interpolation and simulation editing. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our formulation and its potential impact.Comment: 27 pages, 22 figures and 3 tables; project page: https://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/NeuralClothSim

Advanced modelling and design of a tennis ball

Modern tennis has been played for over a hundred years, but despite significant improvements in the design and manufacture of tennis balls to produce a long-lasting and consistent product, the design of a tennis ball has barely changed in the last century. While some work has been done to better understand the dynamic behaviour of a tennis ball, no structured analysis has been reported assessing how the typical constructions of the inner rubber core and cloth panels affect its behaviour and performance. This research describes the development of an advanced and validated finite element (FE) tennis ball model which illustrates the effects of the viscoelastic and anisotropic materials of a tennis ball on ball deformation and bounce during impacts with the ground and the racket,representative of real play conditions. The non-linear strain rate properties exhibited by the materials of a tennis ball during high velocity impacts were characterised using a series of experiments including tensile and compressive tests as well as low and high velocity impact tests. The impacts were recorded using a high speed video (HSV) camera to determine deformation, impact time, coefficient of restitution (COR) and spin rate. The ball material properties were tuned to match the HSV results, and the ball s model parameters were in good agreement with experimental data for both normal and oblique impacts at velocities up to 50 m/s and 35 m/s, respectively. A time sequenced comparison of HSV ball motion and FE model confirmed the accuracy of the model, and showed significant improvement on previous models. Although the existing construction of tennis ball cores was found to provide a sufficiently uniform internal structure to base competition standard tennis balls, the anisotropic nature of the cloth panels resulted in deviation angles as high as 1.5 degrees in ball bounce. Therefore, new cloth panel configurations were modelled which allowed the cloth fibre orientations around the ball to be adjusted resulting in better bounce consistency. The effect of cloth seam length on ball flight was explored through wind tunnel tests performed on solid balls made by additive manufacturing (AM) and on actual pressurised tennis ball prototypes. A reverse Magnus effect was observed on the AM balls, however, this phenomenon was overcome by the rough nature of the cloth cover on the real tennis ball prototypes. A ball trajectory simulation showed that there was no obvious dependence between seam length and shot length or ball velocity. Finally, a basic panel flattening method was used to determine the 2Dsize of the cloth panel patterns corresponding to the new configurations, and tiling methods were designed to estimate cloth wastage. The traditional dumbbell design appeared to result in the minimum amount of waste. The work reported in this thesis represents a significant improvement in the modelling of tennis ball core, cloth and seams, as well as the ball s interaction with the ground and racket strings. While this research focused on woven cloth, needle cloth is also widely used in the manufacture of balls in the US. The modelling of needle cloth could therefore be part of a future study. Additionally, details such as the depth and roughness of the cloth seam could be included in the model to study their effect on spin generation. Also, including cloth anisotropy in the flattening method would allow a better prediction of cloth wastage which could then have an influence on the configuration of the cloth panels

The analysis of Blender open-source software cloth simulation capabilities

This article explores Blender open-source software capabilities in the area of cloth simulations. Simulation performance with different scene complexity and quality settings is tested with a script that automates the testing. System resource utilization is measured and the appearance of visual artifacts is taken into consideration. Cloth simulation features of Blender are compared to commercial software