Cloth Animation and Rendering

Abstract

The area of physically-based modeling is situated in the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and physics. The animation of cloth is a particularly interesting application of physically-based modeling, because it aims at fast animation solutions for rather difficult physical problems. Moreover, it addresses one of the major difficulties in creating realistic scenes with virtual actors. The challenge of computer animation is to break down physical models for complex structures as textiles, approximate them efficiently, and run fast simulations with intelligent numerical methods. Furthermore, interactivity and collisions with other objects in the scene are challenges that have motivated much creative work over the recent years. The range of methods proposed in literature is quite large. The techniques vary from simplified methods designed for real-time applications to sophisticated methods that were designed to reproduce measured material properties. Rendering cloth is especially difficult because of its complex material properties. Software rendering can deal with these properties fairly easily, once they have been acquired, but remains too slow for interactive applications. Hardware accelerated rendering often provides a way to achieve interactive renderings, unfortunately complex materials aren’t directly supported. We will demonstrate how interactive rendering with complex materials can nonetheless be achieved