Improved Integration for Cloth Simulation

Abstract

Most methods of cloth simulation produce animations that do not move very freely; the result often looks like the material is “swimming”. The primary sources of this phenomenon are the non-physical dissipation terms often added to the mechanics to ensure stability in the simulation, and the numerical damping that is implicit in the choice of ODE integration schemes. By disposing of the additional dissipation terms and choosing a new integrator, the generalized-a method, that was designed to safely integrate mechanical systems with extraneous high-frequency signals in their temporal component, we obtain more realistic results often with the about the same amount of computation.