ABSTRACT
The beginnings of modern cloth modeling research can be traced back to the 1930s, when the textile mechanics and engineering community was founded and developed to support the textile industry. Starting in the mid-1980s, the computer graphics community also began to show great interest in modeling cloth and cloth structures for use in computer-generated images and animation. The goals of these two groups are very different, and therefore they each focus on different aspects of the same problem. The members of the textile community look at woven cloth as an engineering material. This perspective has led them to measure and model cloth from a mechanical engineering point of view, and they have spent much time on developing devices that measure conventional material properties in cloth. Their modeling efforts focused on developing models that attempted to explain and predict the highly non-linear behavior of cloth. Another significant area of textile mechanics research focuses on modeling the micro-mechanical relationships occurring at thread crossings. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the textile community began to apply this fundamental understanding of cloth mechanical behavior to the problem of predicting the large-scale shape and structure of cloth objects. By this time the computer graphics community, motivated by the desire to produce images of ever-increasing complexity, had already begun to develop simple models that could produce geometric structures that resembled cloth. The goal of this work 20is to develop models that reproduce the look of cloth, within an efficient computational framework. Developers in the computer graphics community are generally interested in creating the simplest model possible that will produce results that appear realistic or acceptable to the average observer. Thus, producing physically accurate and predictive models has never been their goal; they simply want their pictures to “look right.”
