CAMA: Contact-Aware Matrix Assembly with Unified Collision Handling for GPU-based Cloth Simulation

Abstract

We present a novel GPU-based approach to robustly and efficiently simulate high-resolution and complexly layered cloth. The key component of our formulation is a parallelized matrix assembly algorithm that can quickly build a large and sparse matrix in a compressed format and accurately solve linear systems on GPUs. We also present a fast and integrated solution for parallel collision handling, including collision detection and response computations, which utilizes spatio-temporal coherence. We combine these algorithms as part of a new cloth simulation pipeline that incorporates contact forces into implicit time integration for collision avoidance. The entire pipeline is implemented on GPUs, and we evaluate its performance on complex benchmarks consisting of 100 - 300K triangles. In practice, our system takes a few seconds to simulate one frame of a complex cloth scene, which represents significant speedups over prior CPU and GPU-based cloth simulation systems.