Preventing tangled cloth

Geometric pinching can result in cloth simulation output that is a tangle of cloth. We present a technique that eliminates pinching problems prior to simulation. The subsequently solved cloth simulations are cleaner, less tangled, and execute faster when compared to the no preprocessing case. The core algorithm is formulated as a general case mesh problem enforcing a minimal distance invariant, and thus it is applicable to a wide variety of geometric problems. We provide results from its use on feature film productions.