Garment simulation

Citation

Stylios, G.K. (2008), "Garment simulation", International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijcst.2008.05820baa.001

Garment simulation

The topic of garment simulation has been the subject of discussion and debate many times. Being one of the most important areas in clothing science and technology, this cannot be surprising. For almost a century technical and commercial people have been working to find solutions for enabling a true numerical presentation of a garment. There has been a lot of progress and there have been solutions that maybe impressive when looked at first, but there are still weaknesses that are prohibiting this technology to be fully realised. Admittedly there are some systems offered that go a long way to providing numerical solutions for predicting a fabric' drape and even a garment's behaviour. Some companies are already trading with some system that claim of providing garment visualisation or a home shopping platform. One only has to type the word internet shopping or garment draping and will be inundated with some kind of provision, system or package. The important question therefore is where are we in garment simulation, and perhaps to identify if we can, the areas that need further attention.

In simple terms the realisation for a true garment simulation system will be fulfilled if and when the following areas are fully developed and can be integrated with each other:

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  sketching;

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  pattern making;

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  fabric behavior measurement/simulation;

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  toil and stitching;

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  full body size and shape data;

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  garment draping and fitting;

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  full 3D dynamic garment simulation realisation; and

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  or simultaneous toiling, stitching, fitting and draping.

If we were to examine these areas one by one, we will see that some can already provide robust, effectives solutions such as the pattern making and the body sizing areas, others such as the toiling and the garment draping luck in generic and stable treatments that will enable the simulation of more than one type of fabric. Inevitably the integration of all of those different kinds of tools in a robust usable system remains at large to be realised. One of the areas that has had debate in the past and which I want to again bring to our attention is that of determining the behavior of the fabric by measurement. I will not say much about modelling as opposed to directly measuring of the fabric mechanics, because despite some good efforts I would not want to suggest that we will be in a position to modelling everything numerically soon. At the end of the day and as far as the clothing community is concerned we want to be able to simulate a garment on a human body which will be identical, and at least in drape behaviour, with the same garment worn in reality when it is made up. And this is a good position to make an implicit differentiation between what seems to me the existence of two schools; one is the textile school demanding that a garment simulation must be as real as when the garment is made up; their vested interests are in selling of clothes after all, and the other is the graphics and simulation school demanding that a garment simulation looks nice but does not have to be identical to a real garment; after all their interest is to provide a nice simulation for the particular piece of animation, they are not interested to sell the garment, but their effort is to use the animation in, shall we say, a game, an advert or a virtual scenery. Of course there has to be convergence and admittedly we have had some good generic solutions from the graphics and animation school; such as the model presented by Terzopoulos, we are however a little apart and more so in getting a generic solution realised that is so much needed. In consequence somewhere here the measurement technologies come into the fore; these are the instrumentation tools that measure a fabric sample, define how mechanically behaves; stretches, bends and shears, and use these properties to enable the numerical models to provide a realistic simulation when the fabric is animated on a computer screen. Unfortunately we still have some work to be done here; one is to tell the community of both schools that we need to incorporate these measurements into our models, and I acknowledge exceptions of groups that have already done or doing so, and secondly to provide robust and automated instruments that are user friendly to assist and not hinder progress, for use in the researched fabric/garment models. There are of course two of such instruments already available; the KESF (Japan) and the FAST (Australia). Both of these systems have been used in the past, but there have been some difficulties reported in operation, interpretation, reproducibility, high cost, service, etc. which have hindered their wider acceptance by the industry. A newly developed fully automated instrument called FAMOUS is said to have been developed for ease of integration with CAD packages, drape models, simulation tools and retailing systems, this remains to be seen.

One last but not least question is the one flagged as a priority measure by the current EU framework 7 for research and technological development of the states of the EU, and it is the related to garment simulation, it is the topic of mass customisation. For mass customisation to be realized of course the garment simulation component maybe important enough but not on its own. Accepting that garments can be simulated on humans, another equally important questions that in my view needs answering is this of the manufacturing of the garment itself. Where and how this will be done, current manufacturing set ups do not warrant bespoke fabric and garment making, sewing is still labor intensive and requires skill, and fabrics are made to a larger extend in bulk. Some current projects such as the Leapfrog, financed by the EU to address the viability of mass customisation, have to incorporate the work and advances in garment simulation, but it also has to pay attention and take into account generic skills and solutions that originate from some excellent work of the 1990s in Intelligent Sewing Environments, in numerical handling and automated sewing systems. It was even then that the importance of fabric defined in behaviour as an engineering structure was only taken into account by the minority of researchers. Distribution and logistics maybe part of this also, but outside this discussion.

I have not tried to present problems associated with garment simulation but I wanted to highlight that with agreement of minds we can realise one of the most technically demanding areas of clothing science and technology. For 20 years this topic has been given particular priority in IJCST and continues to attract paper contributions towards fulfilling the realisation of garment simulation. Some of these papers can be found in this volume.

G.K. StyliosEditor in Chief