A new skeletal model for fabric drapes

Abstract

Fabric drapes are typical large displacement, large rotation and small strain problems. Compared with continuum shell finite element methods, methods that skeletonize the fabric sheet into a set of interconnected nodes appear to be more popular in drape problems with extensive wrinkles. These skeletal methods may resort to particle mechanics and formulate the elastic energy or the equations of motion in terms of the node-to-node distance and the angles between the straight lines joining adjacent nodes. Alternatively, beam elements can be employed to skeletonize the fabric sheet at the expense of using rotational in addition to translational nodal DOFs. In this paper, a new skeletal model based on the small strain and curvature assumptions is devised. In contrast to most, if not all, skeletal models for fabric drape simulation, all the stretching, shearing and bending energies in the model are simple polynomials of the grid-point displacement. Fabric drape problems with extensive wrinkles are examined. The presence of sharp fold, seam and cut in the undeformed fabric sheet as well as fabric-to-solid contact are considered. The predicted appearances are pleasant and conform to real life observations.