Hardware-assisted self-collision for deformable surfaces

The natural behavior of garments and textile materials in the presence of changing object states is potentially the most computationally demanding task in a dynamic 3D virtual environment. Cloth materials are highly deformable inducing a very large number of contact points or regions with other objects. In a natural environment, cloth objects often interact with themselves generating a large number of self-collisions areas. The interactive requirements of 3D games and physically driven virtual environments make the cloth collisions and self-collisions computations more challenging. By exploiting mathematically well-defined smoothness conditions over smaller patches of deformable surfaces and resorting to image-based collision detection tests, we developed an efficient collision detection method that achieves interactive rates while tracking self-interactions in highly deformable surfaces consisting of more that 50,000 elements. The method makes use of a novel technique for dynamically generating a hierarchy of cloth bounding boxes in order to perform object-level culling and image-based intersection tests using conventional graphics hardware support.