Multilevel cloth simulation using GPU surface sampling

Today most cloth simulation systems use triangular mesh models. However, regular grids allow many optimizations as connectivity is implicit, warp and weft directions of the cloth are aligned to grid edges and distances between particles are equal. In this paper we introduce a cloth simulation that combines both model types. All operations that are performed on the CPU use a low-resolution triangle mesh while GPU-based methods are performed efficiently on a high-resolution grid representation. Both models are coupled by a sampling operation which renders triangle vertex data into a texture and by a corresponding projection of texel data onto a mesh. The presented scheme is very flexible and allows individual components to be performed on different architectures, data representations and detail levels. The results are combined using shader programs which causes a negligible overhead. We have implemented CPU-based collision handling and a GPU-based hierarchical constraint solver to simulate systems with more than 230k particles in real-time.