Flexible shape control for automatic resizing of apparel products

We provide a flexible shape control technique in this paper for the automatic resizing of apparel products. The automatic resizing function has become an essential part of the 3D garment CAD systems to generate user customized apparel products for individuals with variant body shapes. The human bodies are usually represented by piecewise linear mesh surfaces with consistent connectivity. The shape of apparel products can then be warped from the space around a human body to the space around another body by computing the new positions of points on apparel products. However, one major limitation of this kind of automatic resizing technique is that the apparel products are always distorted along the shape of the human bodies. This is a required deformation for tight clothes but not an expected result for other types of clothes. To solve this problem, we investigate a method to preserve the shape of user-defined features on the apparel products. As the apparel products are often represented by discrete surfaces with non-manifold entities, the existing mesh processing approaches that preserve the local shape cannot be applied here. A new algorithm consisting of three steps is developed in this paper. First, the apparel product is warped from the reference human body to the space around the target human body. Second, the shape of features is optimized to match their original shape before the warping. Lastly, discrete surfaces of the apparel product are deformed again under an optimization framework to match their original shapes locally while interpolating the shape of features determined in the previous step.

Research highlights
► A new shape matching based method to preserve the shape of features defined on apparel products, where the features can be easily specified on apparel products with very simple interactions.
► A new shape optimization method, which can be applied to discrete surfaces containing non-manifold entities and does not need to solve large linear systems.