Real-time clothing: geometry and physics

Abstract

This paper describes a technique that allows pieces of clothing to be placed over an animated articulated character in real-time. In order to do this, the character to be dressed must be approximated using a hierarchy of ellipsoids. The pieces of clothing are represented using mass-spring particle systems; the particles move by applying dynamic forces to them and integrating the system with an explicit method. Penetration of the character’s ellipsoids by any particle are avoided; to facilitate and accelerate these calculations the ellipsoids are arranged in groups and an adjacency graph is constructed between these groups. This method is fast enough to deliver real-time performance on mid-range PCs and workstations, using only portable and standard C++ and OpenGL code.