Simulating Chain, Rope, and then Cloth

CS 493/693 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

By creating a 1D grid of links that pull only when stretched, we can simulate chain. Sadly, we need 0.1ms timesteps to even approach the stiffness of steel.

By adding a term to push back against bending, we have a reasonable simulation of rope, hose, or thick wire.

By interlinking a 2D grid of these same links, we have a simulation for a very wimpy cloth; adding diagonals makes a fairly robust cloth simulation.

693 Students Only (Technical Literature)

For a modern approach to simulating cloth, see this surprisingly readable paper:

Simulation of clothing with folds and wrinkles, R. Bridson, S. Marino, and R. Fedkiw, Proc. ACM/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2003, pp. 28-36.

For an entirely different but interesting energy-based approach to cloth simulation, including some experimental data from a cloth-manipulating machine, see this older paper:

D.E. Breen, D.H. House and M.J. Wozny, "Predicting the Drape of Woven Cloth Using Interacting Particles,"Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '94 Conference, (Orlando, FL, July 1994) pp. 365-372.