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
