Interactive animation of cloth including self collision detection

We describe a system for interactive animation of cloth, which can be used in e-commerce applications, games or even in virtual prototyping systems. In order not to restrict the shape of the cloth we use a triangulated mesh, which serves as basis of a mass-spring system. For the animation of the particles internal and external forces are considered. Since cloth is a very rigid material when stretched, extremely large forces occur in such a system. Several methods have been described in the recent years to solve the underlying differential equations efficiently. We describe an algorithm which replaces the internal cloth forces by several constraints and therefore can easily take large time steps. These constraints can be parameterized to generate different behavior of the simulated cloth. Furthermore we provide an algorithm for an efficient avoidance of self collisions. For these reasons very plausible animations of cloth at interactive rates are possible with our system.