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Directing Cloth Draping through Blended UVs
Juan Carlos Olmos Guerra, Fernando de Goes, Christine Waggoner, David Eberle
Blends 3D target shapes into 2D fabric panels via custom UVs to retarget cloth simulations toward artist-directed draping looks, used in Inside Out 2 and Elio.
Abstract
Cloth draping is a prevalent tailoring process that gives 3D form to sewn 2D panels of fabric. However, when dressing animated characters, artists often prefer to model garments with delineated spatial structures and clean silhouettes at the cost of diminishing the presence of folds and wrinkles produced by draping. To reconcile stylization and realism, this work describes a new approach for directing cloth draping that accommodates 3D shaping and 2D pattern making simultaneously. Our key contribution is a method that generates custom UVs blending the distortion induced by 3D shapes into 2D fabric panels. As a result, we can retarget cloth simulations to compute physically plausible draping deformations that smoothly transition to prescribed 3D forms. To assist the garment design, we also propose a flattening tool that constructs low-resolution UV panels amenable to 2D manipulation. We showcase our results with a series of garment assets and cloth animations from Pixar feature films Inside Out 2 (2024) and Elio (2025).
How to read this
- Category
- Method: a cloth-draping / simulation-retargeting technique
- Contributions
- A method that generates custom UVs blending the distortion of 3D target shapes into 2D fabric panels, so simulations retarget toward artist-directed draping.
- Physically plausible draping deformations that smoothly transition into prescribed 3D forms, reconciling stylization with realism.
- A flattening tool that builds low-resolution UV panels amenable to 2D manipulation to assist garment design.
- Context
- Sits in Pixar's production cloth pipeline and builds directly on the tailoring work of Waggoner et al. (Revamping the Cloth Tailoring Pipeline at Pixar), extending 2D pattern making toward simultaneous 3D shaping.Builds on: Revamping the Cloth Tailoring Pipeline at Pixar
- Correctness
- Demonstrated on garment assets and cloth animations from Inside Out 2 and Elio rather than a broad benchmark, so it is validated as production-proven craft; a reader should keep in mind it targets directed/stylized looks and its generality beyond Pixar's pipeline is not the claim.
- Clarity
- Accessible at a conceptual level; a first pass conveys the blended-UV idea, do a second pass for the UV-blending and retargeting formulation.
- How to read it
- Focus on how the custom UVs encode the 3D-into-2D distortion and how retargeting consumes them; a second pass on the flattening tool pays off if you care about the artist-facing workflow.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Art-Directed Costumes at Pixar: Design, Tailoring, and Simulation in Production 2018 / SIGGRAPH Asia Courses
- Mixing Yarns and Triangles in Cloth Simulation 2020 / CGF
- Untangling Cloth 2003 / SIGGRAPH
- Multi-Resolution Isotropic Strain Limiting 2010 / SIGGRAPH Asia
Keywords
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