An applied approach for real-time level-of-detail woven fabric rendering

Abstract

Photorealistic rendering of fabric is essential in many applications ranging from movie special effects to ecommerce and fashion design. Existing techniques usually render the fabric’s microscale structure. However, this can result in severe aliasing and is unsuitable for interactive cloth simulation and manipulation. In this paper we describe a novel real-time level-of-detail fabric rendering technique. The algorithm adjusts geometry and texture details with changing viewpoint by using a mipmapping approach, in order to obtain a perceptually consistent representation on the screen. Compared to previous work we also introduce more parameters allowing the simulation of a wider range of fabrics. Our evaluation demonstrates that the presented approach results in realistic renderings, increases the shader’s run-time speed, and reduces aliasing artifacts by hiding the underlying yarn geometry.