Asynchronous Cloth Simulation

This paper presents a new method for cloth simulation, which uses asynchronous variants of both time integration and collision handling. Implicit integration methods like backward Euler and BDF-2 are very popular in computer graphics, since they allow for fast and stable animations. However, when combined with large time steps, their inherent numerical dissipation results in over-damped simulations, which lack high frequency details such as small folds and wrinkles. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient method which does not suffer from these restrictions. The time integration component uses an asynchronous variational integrator (AVI), which allows dedicated time steps for every element. Thanks to its energy preserving nature, low-damped cloth materials can be simulated without compromising dynamic motion or suppressing important details. Our collision handling scheme combines both synchronous and asynchronous strategies and, in this way, allows focusing computation power on the important regions where collisions actually occur. We provide timings for several integration methods and show that our AVI-based scheme performs consistently better than synchronous explicit variants. Compared to implicit schemes, superior quality is obtained while remaining comparable in terms of computation times. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of our method on a series of challenging animations.