Stable Cloth Animation with Adaptive Level of Detail

Cloth simulation is a highly intensive processor task. Higher details are often traded or sacrificed for speed in order to maintain the simulation at reasonable rates. This article proposes a technique to dynamically adjust the level of detail of cloth meshes. Mesh quality, during successive subdivision/simplification operations, is guaranteed by the subdivision scheme adopted. Also, topology of the meshes used in our work exhibits unique features making it attractive in the context of a gradual level of detail variation. Subdivision is triggered by geometric criteria based on estimated surface curvature, evaluated locally. Simplification is started in cloth regions where surface curvature is considered small enough. The choice of a subdivision scheme should avoid introducing, at all costs, discontinuities on the equations governing the simulation. However, reducing the level of detail inevitably leads to such discontinuous scenarios. Our original contribution, with this work, provides a set of techniques that allows us to overcome the numeric instability problems arising from surface simplification in cloth simulations.