Giving Santos™ Clothes: Clothing Modeling
Protective clothing worn by a soldier can greatly affect a soldier's ability to perform physical tasks, such as vehicle egress or ingress. For digital human models to be realistic, they must be able to predict such abilities with reasonable accuracy. The VSR program includes significant effort devoted to techniques for clothing modeling with Santos™ in a digital human modeling environment. The following types of issues are being addressed: (1) the most relevant properties of garments (e.g., mass density, thermal & moisture conductivity: stretch-stiffness characteristics: texture/smoothness); (2) how to effi ciently and yet accurately model the interaction between the human and the garment during physical activity.
Clothing modeling has been of increasing interest in the computer graphics community over the past decade. In video games and in animated movies there is a growing demand to have the characters wear clothing that looks and behaves realistically. Naturally, the clothing forces can range from being negligible to being profound. The significant point in clothing modeling for digital human modeling, though, is that the forces exerted by the garment on the wearer during physical activity must be quantified.
The UI VSR team is actively investigating a variety of competing frameworks for modeling clothing interaction with human models, including: (a) particle based methods; (b) continuum finite element shell modeling; and (c) beam grid finite element modeling. All are being assessed for their relative efficiency and realism, and the most suitable will be included with Santos™.
