A fast, flexible, particle-system model for cloth draping

Animating the drape of different cloths must address complex physical behaviors. This particle approach uses optimizations that make it faster than earlier implementations and allow it to simulate behavior over time. The modeling system presented computes the full trajectories of particles and not just the final positions. This offers several important advantages. Since the full history of each particle is known, hysteresis effects can be modeled accurately. The Kawabata (1980) experimental data for different textiles can be input directly to the model. The effects of external forces, especially those produced by wind or moving solid bodies, can be modeled accurately. Despite this extra dimension of detail, our system computes final positions considerably faster than the times given by Breen, House and Wozny (1994). Our model can be easily extended to simulate the effects of manufacturing processes or interacting bodies. In particular, high stresses of the kind that occur in manufacturing can only be modeled if the full trajectory of each particle is known. We have implemented our model as a C++ class library. Particle systems are more flexible than approaches using continuum mechanics. Our system´s fast computation times, mainly due to the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations, compare favorably to approaches using a finite-element method. Therefore, our approach might be an interesting alternative for other engineering problems currently solved by a finite-element method, for example, the computation of minimal surfaces, heavy membranes, vibrating membranes and population dynamics