Variational Mannequin Approximation Using Spheres and Capsules

We present a method to approximate a mannequin represented as a triangle/quadrangle mesh using spheres and capsules. We formulate this 3-D approximation problem as a 2-D one, which increases its efficiency by one or even two orders of magnitude. Our algorithm first extracts cross sections from a given mannequin, approximates each cross section with circles using a variant of iterative Lloyd clustering, and finally generates capsules based on the circle sets. Compared with previous methods, our method is much faster and is able to get a tighter result with a given number of primitives. Our method can be directly applied to cloth-body collision handling in real-time cloth animation, and the simulation results by our approach are visually plausible.