Cloth simulation and collision detection using geometry images

M.Sc. (Computer Science)A challenge faced when simulating the complex behaviour of cloth, especially at interactive frame rates, is maintaining an acceptable level of realism while keeping computation time to a minimum. A common method used to increase the performance is to decrease the number of nodes controlling the cloth's movement. This results in a significant decrease in the time taken to calculate each frame of the animation, but at the cost of sacrificing detail that can only be obtained using a dense discretisation of the cloth. A simple, efficient and popular method to simulate cloth is the mass-spring system, which utilises a regular grid of vertices representing discrete points along the cloth's surface. The structure of geometry images is similar, which makes them an ideal choice for representing arbitrary surface meshes in a cloth simulator whilst retaining the effciency of a mass-spring system. This dissertation presents a novel method of applying geometry images to cloth simulation in order to obtain cloth motion for surface meshes while retaining the simplicity of a massspring model. By adapting an implicit/explicit integration scheme, and utilising the regular structure of geometry images, an improvement in performance is achieved. Additionally, the cloth is able to drape over other objects, also represented as geometry images. The proposed method is efficient enough to allow fairly dense cloth meshes to be simulated in real-time