Garment Design System Based on Body Model
Masaki Oshita

Syouma Yamanaka

Kyushu Institute of Technology
680-4 Kawazu, Iizuka, Fukuoka, 820-8502, Japan
Email: oshita@ces.kyutech.ac.jp

Kyushu Institute of Technology
680-4 Kawazu, Iizuka, Fukuoka, 820-8502, Japan
Email: yamanaka@cg.ces.kyutech.ac.jp

Abstract—In this paper, we propose a garment design system
based on a body model. Given a human body model, a user
can specify range and distance functions over the body and arm
axes by drawing a few strokes on the screen. The system thengenerates a garment based on these strokes. Various kinds ofgarments such as shirts, long and short pants, and dresses canbe easily designed.

I.

(a) input body modelarm axis

I NTRODUCTION
body axis

Garments are an important element of virtual humans.
Garments must be designed for many applications such as
computer animation, computer games, and digital fusion. Recently, not only professional creators but also casual users
design garment models for their own avatars, which areused for on-line communication, producing animations for online video sharing, making custom figures for 3D printing,etc. However, conventional modeling systems are difficult touse. Designing garments is a time consuming task, even for
professional creators. Although some sketch-based systems
for designing garments have been proposed, they are forprofessional designers.
A garment is typically designed for a body model, so that
it fits and covers the body. Our novel idea is to parameterize
a garment shape using functions of the range and distance
between the body and the garment along the axes. In this paper,
we propose a garment design system based on a body model,
as shown in Figure 1. Given a human body model, a user
can specify range and distance functions over the body andarm axes by drawing a few strokes on the screen. The systemthen generates a garment based on the strokes. Various kindsof garments such as shirts, long and short pants, and dresses
can be easily designed. We present some experimental results
using our method, and discuss its effectiveness and limitations.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II reviews related work. Sections III and IV describe ourinterface design and garment generation method, respectively.
Section V shows our experimental results. Section VI concludes this paper.
II.

R ELATED W ORK

Designing garment models using conventional 3dimensional modeling software is tedious. Sketch-based
systems have been proposed [1], [2] as a solution to thisproblem. A garment model can be generated from one ora few 2-dimensional sketches of the garment. For example,
Turquin et al. [2] proposed a method for generating a garment
from two sketches (front and back). A garment sketch is a(b) input parameters (strokes)
distance

area
neck

trunk

waist
body axis

legankle shoulder handarm axis(c) generated garment modelFig. 1. Overview of the proposed method. A body model (a) and stokes on
the 2-dimensional parameter space (b) are used to generate a garment (c).

common tool used by professional designers. However, this is
not easy for non-professional users.
Another approach is to create garments by designing
patterns [3], [1], [4]. Real-world garments are produced bysewing 2-dimensional patterns. Given a set of patterns, a virtual
garment model can be generated using a physics simulation.
Umetani et al. [3] developed an interactive system that can beused to seamlessly design both the patterns and the resulting

garment model. However, pattern design requires professional
knowledge.
There are methods that deform a garment based on a bodymodel [4], [5]. For example, Brouet et al. [4] proposed amethod for deforming an existing garment model so that it
fits a body model. However, their system requires a predefined
garment model.
Several systems use a body model as a reference, so that auser can design garments based on the body model. Wibowo
et al. [6] developed a system for designing a garment using
a real mannequin by sketching the contours of a garment on
it. Although the user can specify the area of the body, it is
not easy to specify the distances between the garment andthe body. Xu et al. [7] developed a system that designs theshape of a garment by editing the contours extracted fromsections of the body model. With this system, the user must
edit multiple contours of sections in 3-dimensional space.
Unlike these methods, our system provides a simple interface
so that a user can specify area and distance parameters on a2-dimensional space.
III.

I NTERFACE D ESIGNThis section describes the user interface of our system andhow it generates garments.
The input to our system is a body model without a garment(a naked model). In addition to the geometry (polygon mesh)of the body, the axes of the body and arms must be specified,
as shown in Figure 1(a). These axes are either manuallyspecified by the designer or automatically derived from thebone structure (when the body is rigged with bones). The bodymodel is supposed to be standing in a t stance, i.e. standing
naturally with arms to the side, parallel to the ground.
A user of our system can design a garment by drawing
strokes on the screen using a mouse, touch, or pen input device,as shown in Figure 1(b). The drawing area is divided into twoparts: the body and arm axes. A stroke specifies the rangeof a piece of garment to be generated along the body andarm axes, in the x-axis of the input area. It also specifies thedistance function between the body and garment surfaces, over
the range of the y-axis of the input area. A stroke must not go
backwards, that is, a stroke only has one distance value at eachpoint over the range. This constraint is automatically applied
when the user draws a stroke in the input area.
By drawing one or a few strokes, the range and distanceparameters of a garment are specified and a garment model isgenerated immediately. Our system provides an interface fordrawing, erasing, and updating strokes using a mouse, touch,or pen input device. A user can design garments quickly in aninteractive way. Figure 1(c) shows an example of a generated
garment.
Additionally, the user can specify either skirt or pants mode
for the lower body. A different algorithm is applied to generate
an appropriate garment based on the specified mode. The user
can also choose the color and material for the garment. In ourprototype, the user can select from a number of predefinedcolors and materials.
The user can design layers of multiple garments by repeating this process. When the user draws a stroke for aFig. 2. Visualization of the 3-dimensional grids around the body model. Thespheres represent grid modes. Their colors represent the distance to the bodymodel (white is close and red is far).

new additional garment, the constraint is automatically appliedso that the new stroke (garment) does not penetrate into theexisting strokes (garments).
Our system generates garment geometries for a given bodyin a given pose. Although animation of the generated garments
is outside of the scope of this paper, conventional methods suchas skinning and physics simulations [8] can be applied to thegarment model.
Although our system is easy to use, it has limitations.
Our system generates the overall shapes of garments. Details
such as collars, frills, ribbons, pockets, and buttons cannot
be created. However, it is possible to extend our system sothat the user can select these details from a number of predefined models, and combine them with their garment model.
Our system is also limited to symmetrical garments. Althoughmost garments are symmetrical, there are non-symmetricalgarments such as one shoulder dresses. It is possible to extend
our system so that a user can make different strokes atseveral garment angles. However, the interface would become
very complex and impractical. Since we did not enforce any
constraints, a generated garment may penetrate into the bodymodel or itself, especially when a large distance is specified.
However, our system provides an interactive interface, so theuser can tune the input parameters to avoid such penetrations.
Although drapes cannot be generated by our system, they
can be produced by applying cloth simulations to a generated
garment [8], [1]. Despite these limitations, our method caneffectively create the overall shapes of garments.
IV.

G ARMENT G ENERATIONThis section describes our garment generation method.
A geometrical garment model (triangular mesh) is generated
based on a set of given strokes. We use the marching cube
method [9], which generates a surface that has a specified value(threshold) within a 3-dimensional space with continuously
varying values. We use the distance to the body model as thisvalue. Instead of using a constant threshold, we change thethreshold based on the parameters (distance function) of thegiven strokes.

Fig. 4.

Examples of generated garments. Input parameters (left) and generated garment models (right).

(a) pants mode(b) skirt mode

The 3-dimensional space around the body model is divided
into 3-dimensional grids (see Figure 2). In our implementation,
the size of each cell is set to 0.02 𝑚. The threshold forgenerating the garment surface is determined for each cell. At
each point of the body axis, the threshold is derived from thedistance function (strokes). The same threshold is distributed
to all cells on the hyperplane perpendicular to the body axis. Ifthe distance function does not have a value on the body axis, nothreshold is given to the cells on the hyperplane. As result, nogarment surface is generated in these areas. The same process
is applied to the arm axes. For each cell, we use the smallest
threshold from the body and arm axes.
The distance to the body surface is computed for eachnode of the grid (see Figure 2). As described in Section III,
we can specify whether to generate a skirt or pants for eachstroke. When skirt mode is selected, the lower body model isreplaced with a cylinder, which is generated by extending thecontour of the hip toward the feet. The lower body garment isgenerated based on the distance to the cylinder, instead of thebody model. As result, the shape of the cross section becomes
elliptic instead of hyperbolic, as expected for a skirt-like shape(see Figure 3). We introduced skirt mode because the generated
garment has unnatural folds if we always use the distance tothe body model, as shown in the bottom-left image in Figure
3.

Fig. 3. Examples of garments generated using the skirt (a) and pants (b)modes with the same distance functions. The top examples used a small
distance and the bottom examples used a large distance. Pants mode typically
only uses small distances.

V.

R ESULTS

We generated various garments using our system. Some
examples are shown in Figure 4. One or a few layers ofgarments were created for each example. Each garment only
took a few minutes to generate.
As an experiment, we tried to reproduce the garments

of characters from some animes and comics. These characters often wear unique costumes that are different fromordinary garments. As explained in Section III, details suchas drapes, collars, frills, ribbons, pockets, and buttons cannot
be reproduced by this prototype. However, the overall shapesof garments and a few layers of garments were successfullyreproduced. Thus, we believe that our method can effectively
design initial garment shapes.
VI.

C ONCLUSION

In this paper, we proposed a garment design system basedon a body model. Although the range of possible garments
is limited, various kinds of garments such as shirts, long andshort pants, and dresses can be easily designed in an interactive
way. Our approach should be useful to casual users who wish
to design garment models for their own avatars. In the future,
we intend to include additional functions for adding details(collar, frill, ribbon, pockets, button, etc.), extend the method
to non-symmetric shapes, and combine the model with physics
simulations to generate drapes, etc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (No. 15H02704) from the Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
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