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Large Steps in Cloth Simulation
Implicit integration makes cloth simulation stable at large time steps, the foundation of production cloth (and of Maya nCloth's lineage).
Abstract
The bottleneck in most cloth simulation systems is that time steps must be small to avoid numerical instability. This paper describes a cloth simulation system that can stably take large time steps by coupling a new technique for enforcing constraints on individual cloth particles with an implicit integration method. The simulator models cloth as a triangular mesh, with internal forces derived from a simple continuum formulation supporting anisotropic stretch or compression and a unified treatment of damping forces. The implicit method generates a large unbanded sparse linear system at each step, solved with a modified conjugate gradient method that simultaneously enforces particle constraints exactly, yielding a system significantly faster than previous cloth simulators.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: a cloth simulation algorithm
- Contributions
- An implicit integration method letting cloth simulation take large, stable time steps
- A constraint technique enforced exactly on individual particles, coupled into the implicit solve
- A continuum-style triangle-mesh force model with anisotropic stretch/compression and unified damping, solved by a modified conjugate gradient method
- Context
- Builds on the deformable-models lineage (Terzopoulos et al.'s Elastically Deformable Models) and became a foundation for production cloth solvers.Builds on: Elastically Deformable Models
- Correctness
- The key claim is stability at large time steps via implicit integration; the trade-off, common to implicit methods, is numerical damping and per-step cost from solving a large sparse system, which a reader should weigh against the step-size gains.
- Clarity
- Mathematically dense but well organized; a first pass conveys why implicit stepping helps, real understanding needs a second and likely third pass.
- How to read it
- First pass for the stability argument and the force model overview; budget a careful second/third pass on the implicit formulation and the constrained conjugate-gradient solver if implementing.
Builds on
Built upon by
- Robust Treatment of Collisions, Contact and Friction for a Skinned Cloth Simulation 2002
- Robust Treatment of Collisions, Contact and Friction for Cloth Animation 2002
- Discrete Shells 2003
- Fast Cloth Simulation on Moving Humanoids 2005
- A Mass Spring Model for Hair Simulation 2008
- Continuum-based Strain Limiting 2009
- Adaptive Anisotropic Remeshing for Cloth Simulation 2012
- Data-Driven Estimation of Cloth Simulation Models 2012
- Smoothed Aggregation Multigrid for Cloth Simulation 2015
- Simulating Cloth Using Bilinear Elements 2021
- Progressive Simulation for Cloth Quasistatics 2022
Related work
- Simulation of Clothing with Folds and Wrinkles 2003 / SCA
- Untangling Cloth 2003 / SIGGRAPH
- Small Steps in Physics Simulation 2019 / SCA
- Fast Cloth Simulation on Moving Humanoids 2005 / Eurographics
Keywords
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