Simulating Cloth in CG

monty writes: "Creating realistic clothing in games may not seem that difficult, but according to one of Intel's research programmers it turns out it is very difficult indeed. Intel senior technical marketing manager Dean Macri gave a presentation at the recent AGDC outlining the problems with simulating cloth, and some possible solutions. There is an online presentation (including downloadable source code and a fully configurable executable of the demonstration simulation) at The math is a bit intense, but the implications are that realistic cloth simulation remains out of reach for today's processors." Monty found it on BigKid, but I couldn't ;)

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Pixar short

[RobertGraham]

The two big problems in CGI have been clothing and hair. This is why Pixar created the animated short "Geri's Game": it showed off some impressive new clothing algorithms, though they still couldn't do the hair right. However, I've seen the preview to Pixar's next movie that includes a hairy monster: the hair is amazing.

The problem with clothing is that different fabrics "hang" differently. Apparently, this is a big issue in the clothing industry and determines why clothing designers choose different fabrics for different outfits: it isn't just how the fabric looks, but how it behaves. The computer has to emulate the performance of the cloth not just in terms of how it behaves at vertices and how it stretches, but also how it behaves along with gravity. If you look in "Geri's Game", notice how the clothing folds. The designers had to emulate not just the person's body, but the structure of clothing on top of that body (until now, clothing has always been animated along with the body). Don't even get me started on the problems of textures.

In essence, the problem is very, very difficult. It is not so much a question of computing power; we are still working on how exactly to model it in the first place.