Efficient GPU Cloth Simulation with Non-distance Barriers and Subspace Reuse

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-based cloth simulation method that uses a non-distance barrier approach and subspace reuse to achieve real-time performance and high-quality animations for high-resolution garments.

Contribution

It presents a novel barrier formulation independent of mesh distances and a subspace reuse strategy to significantly improve cloth simulation efficiency.

Findings

Outperforms existing fast cloth simulators by at least an order of magnitude.

Maintains high-quality animations for high-resolution models.

Ensures penetration-free, untangled cloth simulation.

Abstract

This paper pushes the performance of cloth simulation, making the simulation interactive even for high-resolution garment models while keeping every triangle untangled. The penetration-free guarantee is inspired by the interior point method, which converts the inequality constraints to barrier potentials. We propose a major overhaul of this modality within the projective dynamics framework by leveraging an adaptive weighting mechanism inspired by barrier formulation. This approach does not depend on the distance between mesh primitives, but on the virtual life span of a collision event and thus keeps all the vertices within feasible region. Such a non-distance barrier model allows a new way to integrate collision resolution into the simulation pipeline. Another contributor to the performance boost comes from the subspace reuse strategy. This is based on the observation that low-frequency strain propagation is near orthogonal to the deformation induced by collisions or self-collisions, often of high frequency. Subspace reuse then takes care of low-frequency residuals, while high-frequency residuals can also be effectively smoothed by GPU-based iterative solvers. We show that our method outperforms existing fast cloth simulators by at least one order while producing high-quality animations of high-resolution models.