D.Breen - "A Particle-Based Model for Simulating the Draping Behaviour of Woven Cloth" (1993)

This paper set out to produce simulations of the various "draping" behaviours in a range of woven fabric types.

This paper very much acknowledges the underlying structure of what we refer to when we talk about cloth - we are refering to a complex woven material that contains thousands of fibres of "warp" and "weft" threads.

It poses questions such as "what would this shirt look like if made from polyester instead of cotton?"

This paper claims it is the first of its kind to attempt to simulate a specific type of fabric.

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The model is based on interacting particles.

Emperical data from the well-known Kawabata fabric analysis system is used to tweak the model to exhibit realistic draping bahviour of particular fabrics.

It is noted that different fabric behaviours depend on lots of factors including the type of fibre (silk, cotton, polyester ect), the weight of the yarn and the tighness of the weave.

The approach taken attempts to model the low-level microscopic interactions of the fabric in belief that the correct macroscopic higher-level features will manifest themselves.

As mentioned earlier the complex composition of fabric and how this effects its "draping behaviour" is considered in this model, meaning cloth is not simply considered a continuous sheet.

However, it says that to completely model all the interactions of thousands of fibres is simply too computationally expensive and thus an undesirable approach.
So a happy medium is obtained where complexity is aknowledged such that the most important interactions of cloth can be modelled.

Energy of the cloth is modelled and broken down into repulsion energy, stretch energy, bend energy, trellising energy and gravitational energy. The methods by which these are evaluated are discussed in the paper.

It reports that the "bend" and "trellising" energies are the most significant contributors to the draping behaviour of the cloth and that using their inital configuration, they were not able to convincingly simulate different types of cloth.

So thats why Breen moved to the Kawabata system to "tweak" his model from empirical data.

Simulation times are reported as being on the scale of days! One particular simulation is quoted as having taken 1 CPU-week on an IBM RS/6000 workstation!

While this hardware is nothing compared with what we have available to us now, the method clearly has efficiency issues (which are acknowleged in the paper), especially when considering simulating cloth for real-time applications at 30 frames-per-second.