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

An Edge-based Approach to Adaptively Refining a Mesh for Cloth Deformation

Simulating cloth in real-time is a challenging endeavour due to the number of triangles necessary to depict the potentially frequent changes in curvature, in combination with the physics calculations which model the deformations. To alleviate the costs, adaptive methods are often employed to refine the mesh in areas of high curvature, however, they do not often consider a decimation or coarsening of areas which were refined previously. In addition to this, the triangulation and consistency checks required to maintain a continuous mesh can be prohibitively time consuming when attempting to simulate larger pieces of cloth. In this paper we present an efficient edge-based approach to adaptively refine and coarsen a dynamic mesh, with the aim to exploit the varied nature of cloth by trading the level of detail in flat parts for increased detail in the curved regions of the cloth. An edge-based approach enables fast incremental refinement and coarsening, whereby only two triangles need updating on each split or join of an edge. The criteria for refinement includes curvature, edge length and edge collisions. Simple collision detection is performed allowing interactions between the cloth and the other objects in the environment