Stable but responsive cloth

TLDR

Cloth simulation must capture natural wrinkle dynamics, but buckling causes structural instability that cannot be avoided by semi‑implicit methods, and while damping can suppress instabilities it often reduces realism. The paper proposes a semi‑implicit cloth simulation technique that is both stable and responsive. It uses a particle‑based physical model with a semi‑implicit integration scheme to manage post‑buckling instability without introducing fictitious damping. The technique yields highly realistic cloth animations with large fixed time steps, achieving significant stability and realism gains by overcoming post‑buckling and numerical instabilities, though adding damping can suppress instabilities at the cost of realism.

Abstract

We present a semi-implicit cloth simulation technique that is very stable yet also responsive. The stability of the technique allows the use of a large fixed time step when simulating all types of fabrics and character motions. The animations generated using this technique are strikingly realistic. Wrinkles form and disappear in a quite natural way, which is the feature that most distinguishes textile fabrics from other sheet materials. Significant improvements in both the stability and realism were made possible by overcoming the post-buckling instability as well as the numerical instability. The instability caused by buckling arises from a structural instability and therefore cannot be avoided by simply employing a semi-implicit method. Addition of a damping force may help to avoid instabilities; however, it can significantly degrade the realism of the cloth motion. The method presented here uses a particle-based physical model to handle the instability in the post-buckling response without introducing any fictitious damping.