Stitch Mesh is a ‘yarn-based simulation technique’ to create highly detailed and realistic geometry of knitted garments in 3D.
Stages of our knitted garment modeling system
Knitted poncho with a Ribbing pattern, simulated on a mannequin.
Knitted glove with a Ribbing pattern formed by alternating knit and purl stitches.
Recent yarn-based simulation techniques permit realistic and efficient dynamic simulation of knitted clothing, but producing the required yarn-level models remains a challenge. The lack of practical modeling techniques significantly limits the diversity and complexity of knitted garments that can be simulated. We propose a new modeling technique that builds yarn-level models of complex knitted garments for virtual characters. We start with a polygonal model that represents the large-scale surface of the knitted cloth. Using this mesh as an input, our interactive modeling tool produces a finer mesh representing the layout of stitches in the garment, which we call the \emph{stitch mesh}. By manipulating this mesh and assigning stitch types to its faces, the user can replicate a variety of complicated knitting patterns. The curve model representing the yarn is generated from the stitch mesh, then the final shape is computed by a yarn-level physical simulation that locally relaxes the yarn into realistic shape while preserving global shape of the garment and avoiding “yarn pull-through,” thereby producing valid yarn geometry suitable for dynamic simulation.
Using our system, we can efficiently create yarn-level models of knitted clothing with a rich variety of patterns that would be completely impractical to model using traditional techniques. We show a variety of example knitting patterns and full-scale garments produced using our system.
Cem Yuksel, Jonathan M. Kaldor, Doug L. James, Steve MarschnerStitch
Meshes for Modeling Knitted Clothing with Yarn-level Detail ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2012), 31, 3, 2012
[Preprint PDF] - 9.1MB
