Cloth simulation and collision detection using geometry images

The simulation and animation of cloth has attracted considerable research interest by the computer graphics community. Cloth that behaves realistically is already expected in animated films, and real-time applications are certain to follow. A common 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 of increasing the efficiency is a decrease in the number of nodes controlling the cloth movement, sacrificing details that could only be obtained using a dense discretization of the cloth. A simple and efficient 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 efficiency of a mass-spring system. In this paper we present a novel method to apply geometry images to cloth simulation in order to obtain cloth motion for surface meshes of arbitrary genus, while retaining the simplicity of a mass-spring model. We also adapt an implicit/explicit integration scheme, utilising the regular structure of geometry images, to improve performance. Additionally, the cloth is able to drape over other objects, also represented as geometry images. Our method is efficient enough to allow for fairly dense cloth meshes to be simulated in real-time.