Virtual knitting makes simulated sweaters look cosier

Hal Hodson, technology reporter

Human knitters don't need to think much about damping, friction or many of the other physical properties of how strands of yarn interact: they just get on with it. But that's exactly how computer-simulated knitting from researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, works. It uses these parameters to build a model of the complex interactions within wool to build eye-popping simulations of items like sweaters, a woolly hat or a tea cosy (see video).

Typically, computer-drawn clothing is modelled on flat, uniform elastic sheets. This works fine for woven materials, but begins to look "rubbery" if the model is stretched as much as knitted clothing does naturally.

Simulations which take the physical properties of each loop of wool into account can avoid this. But building a virtual garment by manually defining every interaction between every thread would be too time-consuming to be practical.

To solve this problem, Steve Marschner and colleagues from Cornell, from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and from Facebook have developed a method of simulating knitted clothing that breaks each garment up into a series of polygons. A knitting pattern is cut to fit into each polygon, and then tiled in a repeating fashion across the whole garment.

The researchers suggest that their technique will be useful to the design community, allowing the creation of strikingly convincing textiles for use in animated films or online shopping outlets.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2294d12c/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C0A80Csimulated0Esweaters0Elook0Ereally0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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