“Cloth Simulation on the GPU”

Building on the trend of offloading more tasks from the CPU to the GPU to take advantage of the GPU’s steeper performance curve, we propose a new method to simulate cloth on any GPU supporting Shader Model 3. Our implementation is geared toward performance and visual realism, rather than physical accuracy. As such, it’s more suitable to applications such as 3D games and virtual reality systems. These applications usually don’t need the result of the cloth simulation on the CPU as it is only used for rendering, making a GPU implementation even more relevant. Cloth simulation lends itself well to a GPU implementation since a piece of cloth can be modeled as a 2D network of many particles with the same dynamic, thus mapping naturally to a texture processed by the same pixel shader. Such a mapping is also texture cache friendly since each particle generally interacts only with its neighboring particles.
Our method improves on [Green 2003] by proposing a robust implementation for the relaxation step and by including the management of cloth attachment points and cloth cuts (Figure 1).

Green, S. Stupid OpenGL Shader Tricks. Advanced OpenGL Game Programming Course, Game Developer Conference 2003.
Jakobsen, T. Advanced character physics. Game Developer Conference 2001.