Inequality Cloth

Abstract

As has been noted and discussed by various authors, numerical simulations of deformable bodies often adversely suffer from so-called ''locking'' artifacts. We illustrate that the ''locking'' of out-of-plane bending motion that results from even an edge-spring-only cloth simulation can be quite severe, noting that the typical remedy of softening the elastic model leads to an unwanted rubbery look. We demonstrate that this ''locking'' is due to the well-accepted notion that edge springs in the cloth mesh should preserve their lengths, and instead propose an inequality constraint that stops edges from stretching while allowing for edge compression as a surrogate for bending. Notably, this also allows for the capturing of bending modes at scales smaller than those which could typically be represented by the mesh. Various authors have recently begun to explore optimization frameworks for deformable body simulation, which is particularly germane to our inequality cloth framework. After exploring such approaches, we choose a particular approach and illustrate its feasibility in a number of scenarios including contact, collision, and self-collision. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the inequality approach when it comes to folding, bending, and wrinkling, especially on coarser meshes, thus opening up a plethora of interesting possibilities.