Particle pair system: An interlaced mass-spring system for real-time woven fabric simulation

Woven fabrics are widely used in clothing because of their parallel and interlaced properties, which are formed by weaving. A wide range of applications, from 3D games to textile design, adopt woven fabrics for cloth animation due to the fact that weaving can be immediately shown on the cloth. Today, cloth animation at the macro scale is successfully accomplished using single particle systems, processes of treating the cloths as sheets of single particles interconnected with spring-dampers. However, the existing single particle systems become limited when applied to show the interlaced structures between the yarns. In this paper, we introduce the particle pair system, a dynamics system of particle pairs for woven fabric simulation. It treats the woven fabric as an interlaced crimp network of weft particles and warp particles. Each weave point of the woven fabric is represented as a particle pair rather than a single particle, providing independent behaviors of particles in the weft direction and the warp direction, respectively. The particles are connected dynamically according to a connectivity matrix which allows for tearing. The atom of the system is the particle pair, a flexible representation that can be tessellated to panel quads at the macro scale, interlaced yarn segments at the meso scale and intertwisted fibers at the micro scale, according to the view distance, for fast rendering. The particle pair system can be easily implemented in current graphics pipelines. We can achieve more than 100 frames per second for a 256 × 256 woven fabric. This allows for large-scale physical animation of woven fabrics that maintain the geometric variances of real 3D yarn and fibers.