Dressing animated synthetic actors with complex deformable clothes

This paper discusses the use of physics-based models for animating clothes on synthetic actors in motion. In our approach, cloth pieces are fist designed with polygonal panels in two dimensions, and are then seamed and attached to the actor's body in three dimensions. After the clothes are created, physical properties are simulated and then clothes are animated according to the actor's motion in a physical environment. We describe the physical models we use and then address several problems we encountered. We examine how to constrain the elements of deformable objects which are either seamed together or attached to rigid moving objects. We also describe a new approach to the problem of handling collisions among the cloth elements themselves, or between a cloth element and a rigid object like the human body. Finally, we discuss how to reduce the number of parameters for improving the interface between the animator and the physics-based model.