Simulation of Tearing Cloth with Frayed Edges

Abstract

Woven cloth can commonly be seen in daily life and also in animation. Unless prevented in some way, woven cloth usually frays at the edges. However, in computer graphics, woven cloth is typically modeled as a continuum sheet, which is not suitable for representing frays. This paper proposes a model that allows yarn movement and slippage during cloth tearing. Drawing upon techniques from textile and mechanical engineering fields, we model cloth as woven yarn crossings where each yarn can be independently torn when the strain limit is reached. To make the model practical for graphics applications, we simulate only tearing part of cloth with a yarn-level model using a simple constrained mass-spring system for computational efficiency. We designed conditions for switching from a standard continuum sheet model to our yarn-level model, so that frays can be initiated and propagated along the torn lines. Results show that our method can achieve plausible tearing cloth animation with frayed edges.