Is Simulating Tiny Cloth Wrinkles Possible? 👕

Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. Today we are going to create beautiful virtual clothes and marvel at how quickly we can simulate them. And the kicker is that these simulations are able to create details that are so tiny, they are smaller than a millimeter. When I first saw this title of this paper, I had two thoughts. First I asked, submillimeter level? Is this really necessary? Well, here is a dress rendered at the level of millimeters. And here is what it would look like with this new simulation technique. Hm, so many crisp details suddenly appeared. Okay, you got me, I am now converted. So let’s proceed to the second issue - here I also said I will believe this kind of quality in a simulation when I see it. So, how does this work? Well, we can give it a piece of coarse input geometry, and this new technique synthesizes and simulates additional wrinkles on it. For instance, here, we can add these vertical shirring patterns to it. And not only that, but we can still manage collision detection, so it can interact with other objects and suddenly, the whole piece looks beautifully lifelike. And as you see here, the direction of these patterns can be chosen by us, and, it gets better, because it can handle other kinds of patterns too. I am a light transport researcher by trade, and I am very pleased by how beautifully these specular highlights are playing with the light. So good. Now, let’s see it in practice. On the left, you see the coarse geometry input, and on the right, you see the magical new clothes this new method can create from them. And, yes, this is it! Finally! I always wondered why virtual characters with simulated clothes always looked a little flat for many years now. These are the details that were missing. Just look at the difference this makes! Loving it. But, how does this stack up agains previous methods? Well, here is a previous technique from last year. And here is the new one. Okay. How do we know which one is really better? Well, we do it in terms of mathematics, and, when looking at the relative errors from a reference simulation, the new one is more accurate. Great. But, hold on to your papers, because here comes the best part! Whoa! It is not only more accurate, but it is blistering fast. Easily eight times faster than this previous method. So, where does this put us in terms of total execution time? At approximately one second per frame, often even less. What? One second per image for a crisp, submillimeter level cloth simulation that is also quite accurate? Wow. The pace of progress in computer graphics research is absolutely amazing. And just imagine what we will be able to do just two more papers down the line. This might run in real time easily. Now, drawbacks. Well, not really a drawback, but there are cases where the submillimeter simulation results materialize in a bit more crisp creases…but not much more. I really had to go to hunt for differences in this one. If you have spotted stark differences between the two here, please let me know in the comments. And here comes one more amazing thing: this paper was written by Huamin Wang and…that’s it. A single author paper that has been accepted to the SIGGRAPH conference, which is perhaps the most prestigious conference in computer graphics. That is a rare sight indeed. You see, sometimes even a single researcher can

make all the difference. Huge congratulations! Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time!