A physically faithful multigrid method for fast cloth simulation

Abstract

We present an efficient multigrid algorithm that is adequate to solve a heavy linear system given in cloth simulation. Although a multigrid solver has been successfully employed to the Poisson problems, it is hard to apply the solver to complicated cloth deformations due to its lack of physical meaning in level construction. We address this problem by developing a physically faithful technique ensuring the conservation of all physical quantities across levels. The performance of our approach is demonstrated on a number of garment simulations implemented by the state of the art techniques: the implicit integration, tyre triangle-based in-plane energy model, and the curvature-based bending energy model. Our multigrid algorithm is about four times faster than the preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method for a garment with 20K particles. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.