Yi Wang's Research -- Cloth Simulation Works

GPU Based Real-Time Clothing Simulation on Moving Charatrers

Interactive GPU Clothing

Download my MS Thesis on Interactive GPU Clothing.

In real-time graphics applications, scenes involving clothing motion are very common. Real-time clothing simulation on moving characters is still a challenging task because of the long computation time to solve the physically based cloth model on the CPU.

To improve the cloth simulation performance, we proposed a level of detail (LOD) method to move part of the cloth simulation work to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on current graphics hardware. Current GPUs are highly parallel stream processors, which do compute-intensive operations more efficiently than the CPUs do but provide less flexible logic controls. We take advantage of both the two processors and combine them into a cloth simulation pipeline. The global motion of the cloth is calculated on the CPU, while the cloth local deformation and cloth rendering are done on the GPU. To minimize the computation on the CPU and the CPU-GPU communication, cloth is modeled as a mesh hierarchy. After the coarse meshes are determined by the CPU, they are sent to GPU for further refinement. A set of GPU algorithms are invented to refine the cloth mesh gradually. Specifically, given the Render-To-Vertex capability of current GPUs, these algorithms can do time evolution, collision detection, cloth untangling and other collision response on GPU. Our approach is designed to be easily integrated in most real-time graphics applications including virtual reality, games and garment CAD.

This project is based on a skeletal based character animation library: Cal3D, Version (0.9.1), which hasn’t yet provide an acceptable cloth animation mechanism except for a basic mash-spring system without any collision detection.

Photo-RealisticTowels

This is my class project for Advanced Computer Graphics: Photo-realistic Rendering of Towels using Layered Modeling Method. I modeled the towel base fabric with implicit surfaces generated from woven pattern and modeled the yarn circles using 3D volume data. The shape of the volume is guided by external forces and noise functions. The towel is rendered using sevethree RenderMan shaders. Here is the technical report in pdf format.

Useful Cloth Simulation Resources:

UCL's Cloth Simulation Links

A Recent Bibliography by David Prirchard

NVidia's Real-Time Cloth Simulation Shader

Thomas Jacobsen's Interactive Physics Simulation Links

Free Graphics Resources