Dr. Matthias Müller-Fischer, PhysX SDK research lead at Nvidia Switzerland, Novodex founder and man behind many core PhysX algorithms, like Position Based Dynamics solver for cloth and soft-bodies, has published another interesting paper – Wrinkle Meshes.
We present a simple and fast method to add wrinkles to dynamic meshes such as simulated cloth or the skin of an animated character. To get the desired surface details, we attach a higher resolution wrinkle mesh to the coarse base mesh allowing the wrinkle vertices to deviate from their attachment positions within a limited range. The shape of the wrinkle mesh is determined by a static solver which runs in parallel to the motion of the base mesh. Our method can be used to automatically enhance a purely animated skin mesh with wrinkles which would be atedious task to do by hand.
The fact that the tessellation of the wrinkle mesh can be chosen independently of the structure of the base mesh can be used to control the look of the wrinkles. The locations of wrinkle formation can be defined by painting the maximum distance the wrinkle mesh is allowed to deviate from the base mesh. The second important application of wrinkle meshes is to add detail to simulated meshes such as cloth. Our method allows one to reduce the resolution of the simulation mesh without losing interesting surface detail. This speeds up the simulation, collision detection and handling and it reduces stretchiness. We show the efficiency and visual quality of the approach in a real-time setting.
In generally, that means more detailed cloth simulation with less resourse consumption. Previous research – Hierarchical Position Based Dynamics – was already added in PhysX SDK 2.8.3 so we believe that Wrinkle Meshes will appear in PhysX SDK or APEX Clothing module soon enough.
Also, you can download demonstrational video (63 mb)