Fast Simulation of Cloth Tearing

Abstract

Cloth simulation has many applications areas like computer animation, computer games or virtual reality. The simulation of cloth tearing is often a non-trivial process because it requires the capacity of dynamically updating different cloth representations and data structures. For interactive animations, this must be performed as fast as possible. We present a comprehensive description of a technique that can be used to simulate cloth being torn or cut. Despite simplistic and not physically accurate, it is fast and can provide visually pleasing results. Also, it can be easily adapted to work with nearly any cloth model. As an original contribution, we introduce an optimization of this technique by using an especially adapted half-edge data structure. We have implemented the techniques described in this paper in a physics simulator that was specially developed for a garment CAD system. Our tests have shown fast and attractive results.