Estimating Cloth Simulation Parameters from Video - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Estimating Cloth Simulation Parameters from Video

Kiran Bhat, Christopher D. Twigg, Jessica K. Hodgins, Pradeep Khosla, Zoran Popovic, and Steven Seitz
Conference Paper, Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA '03), pp. 37 - 51, July, 2003

Abstract

Cloth simulations are notoriously difficult to tune due to the many parameters that must be adjusted to achieve the look of a particular fabric. In this paper, we present an algorithm for estimating the parameters of a cloth simulation from video data of real fabric. A perceptually motivated metric based on matching between folds is used to compare video of real cloth with simulation. This metric compares two video sequences of cloth and returns a number that measures the differences in their folds. Simulated annealing is used to minimize the frame by frame error between the metric for a given simulation and the real-world footage. To estimate all the cloth parameters, we identify simple static and dynamic calibration experiments that use small swatches of the fabric. To demonstrate the power of this approach, we use our algorithm to find the parameters for four different fabrics. We show the match between the video footage and simulated motion on the calibration experiments, on new video sequences for the swatches, and on a simulation of a full skirt.

Notes
Quicktime Video available at: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/clothParameters/bhat_184.mov

BibTeX

@conference{Bhat-2003-8710,
author = {Kiran Bhat and Christopher D. Twigg and Jessica K. Hodgins and Pradeep Khosla and Zoran Popovic and Steven Seitz},
title = {Estimating Cloth Simulation Parameters from Video},
booktitle = {Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA '03)},
year = {2003},
month = {July},
pages = {37 - 51},
}