Realistic clothing and hair animation are necessary for many applications such as film, gaming, and on-line fashion. Thanks to the advances in computer graphics, highly realistic clothing and hair animation can be produced in recent animation movies by a widely used technique called Physically Based Simulation (PBS). Clothing and hair modeling/animation are also important to other fields such as computer vision. For instance, body form estimation from natural photographs or videos will be more precise when clothing is properly modeled. However, PBS methods suffer from high computational cost and the results are specific to a particular body model. These limitations make PBS unsuitable for applications with tight time budgets such as gaming or a number of computer vision applications that require a generic model for various body shapes.

In this work we describe a complete process from estimating 3D human body form using image evidence to animating the body with data-driven, low-dimensional 3D clothing and hair models. First, we describe a solution to the challenging problem of estimating 3D human body shape from a single photograph or painting using multiple image cues including silhouette, edge, and smooth shading. Second, we explore a 2D clothing model in which the clothing is modeled as a closed contour of points that are offsets from corresponding body contour points. We show the increased accuracy
of 2D body shape estimation and clothing type classification using such a model. The results indicate the potential of using clothing model in various computer vision tasks. Third, we then focus on modeling the appearance of 3D body and propose a complete system for simulating realistic clothing on 3D bodies of any shape and pose without manual intervention. The model is realistic enough to keep the fine wrinkles and details yet it is significantly faster than PBS methods. Fourth, we also present a 3D hair model that enables hair animation of 3D characters in real-time. It not only preserves the key dynamic properties of physical simulation but also gives the users continuous interactive control over hair styles (e.g. length and softness) and external phenomena (e.g. wind). The result is a 3D human body model with realistic clothing and hair that can be simulated along with the body movement.