Pattern-guided thermal buckling and shrinkage simulation for yarn-level woven cloth

Abstract Woven cloth exhibits complex deformation behavior due to yarn-level interlacing structures, directional tension transfer, and the thermal response of fiber materials. In particular, when localized heat is applied, cloth does not simply shrink uniformly over its surface; instead, it forms pattern-dependent shrinkage directions, twisting, thermal softening, and out-of-plane buckling wrinkles. However, existing cloth simulation methods often treat heat-induced deformation as surface-level shrinkage or uniform material variation, making it difficult to represent pattern-dependent heat-induced deformation associated with yarn-level woven structure. This paper proposes a graphics-oriented yarn-level framework for thermal shrinkage and pattern-guided out-of-plane deformation. The proposed method represents regular woven cloth using a non-crimped flat yarn grid composed of warp and weft strands, computes directional heat diffusion along yarn edges, and applies temperature-dependent temporary shrinkage, permanent shrinkage, and thermal softening to each yarn segment. In addition, by using the over-under relationship of the weave pattern and spatial differences in shrinkage, the method computes a shrinkage-gradient-based heuristic buckling control, thereby inducing localized lifting, folding, and nonuniform wrinkle formation in heated regions rather than simple planar contraction. The control amplitude is estimated from shrinkage differences with neighboring nodes and combined with the encoded crossing order and fine yarn-level irregularities. Simulation results with various weave patterns show that the proposed method can generate different shrinkage and wrinkle behaviors under the same thermal conditions depending on patterns such as plain, basket, twill, satin, checker, and herringbone weaves. Compared with applying thermal shrinkage alone, the proposed pattern-guided thermal deformation framework produces nonuniform shrinkage boundaries, localized out-of-plane wrinkles, and yarn-direction-dependent shape variations within the evaluated simulation setting. This study provides a computer-graphics-oriented framework for visually exploring and controlling heat-induced woven-cloth deformation at the yarn level. The proposed method is intended for deformation visualization, animation authoring, virtual textile prototyping, and digital content production, rather than for quantitatively predicting the thermo-mechanical response of a specific real fabric.