ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a procedural technique that was used at Walt Disney Feature Animation in the production of Fantasia 2000 for animating cloth on synthetic characters. In this approach, the stylistic behavior of the costume is outlined prior to the animation of the cloth. The cloth geometry is defined by NURBS patches, and a skeleton structure is also created to approximate this shape. The control vertices on the cloth geometry are clustered and attached to the skeleton joints. Physics-based methods, coupled with behavior-based functions are then used to animate the skeleton structure. Though the basic approach is physics-based, the method has to allow for extensions and modifications to the animation on top of the physical simulation. The method was developed for use in a production environment. It needed to be reasonably fast to handle the production schedule. Speed considerations raised several modeling and animation issues to be resolved during the post-simulation and rendering stages.
