PhD Position F/M Layer-Based Garment Modeling for Textile Form Weaving

See pdf description here: https://team.inria.fr/craft/files/2026/04/FormWeavingThesis.pdf

 

Context
Mass production of garments is responsible for significant waste in the fashion industry. During the manufacturing process, most garments are produced by cutting and sewing fabric panels of diverse shapes, which results in fabric cutting waste. Once fabricated in standardized sizes, many garments do not correspond well to consumers’ fit or taste, and are left unsold or are thrown away after little use. Moreover, the manual labor of cutting and sewing is often done in low-wage remote countries, which further increases the environmental impact of garment production.

Textile Form Weaving is an innovative manufacturing technique that holds the potential of offering a viable solution for zero-waste, local, on-demand fabrication of custom garments [1]. This technology relies on standard looms to produce garments as a connected stack of textile layers (see figure in the attached document), alleviating the need for manual cutting and sewing.

However, existing software for garment design is centered on the traditional process of sewing fabric panels [2], offering little support to the design of layered textile forms. The goal of this Ph.D. is to develop the algorithmic foundations for garment design and simulation centered around textile layers for Textile Form Weaving.

Work environment and requirement
The research will be conducted as a collaboration between the CRAFT team at Inria Université Grenoble Alpes, specialized in digital design and manufacturing, and the GraphDeco team at Inria Université Côte d’Azur, specialized in interactive shape modeling.
The Ph.D. can take place in either team, with regular visits to the other team.

Approach
This research will be conducted in collaboration with experts in garment weaving from TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering [1,3]. Together, we will first formalize the principles of layered-based Textile Form Weaving and deduce typical layer arrangements that can be achieved with this technology. Next, we will develop data structures and algorithms for an interactive garment modeling tool that would allow users to specify the local layering structure of a garment and simulate the corresponding 3D shape obtained when deploying this structure. The simulation should reproduce deformations of the fabric that occur once it is released from the weaving loom, including deformation induced by specific types of yarn [3], which might require advanced yarn-level cloth simulation [4,5].

In the long term, we aim at developing an optimization framework that would allow users to directly edit the simulated 3D garment, and would automatically deduce the corresponding layered weaving pattern, similar in spirit to bi-directional editing tools that have been proposed for cut-and-sew garment modeling [6,7].

References
[1] Milou Voorwinden, Alice Buso, Elvin Karana, and Holly McQuillan.
A Design Space for Animated Textile-forms through Shuttle Weaving: A Case of 3D Woven Trousers. ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715336.3735741

[2] CLO3D Fashion Design Software, https://www.clo3d.com/

[3] Alice Buso, Holly McQuillan, Kaspar Jansen, Elvin Karana.
The unfolding of textileness in animated textiles: An exploration of woven textile-forms. DRS 2022.
https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference- papers/drs2022/researchpapers/208/

[4] Jonathan Leaf, Rundong Wu, Eston Schweickart, Doug L. James, and Steve Marschner. Interactive Design of Periodic Yarn-Level Cloth Patterns. SIGGRAPH Asia 2018. https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/yarnsim/

[5] Rundong Wu, Joy Xiaoji Zhang, Jonathan Leaf, Xinru Hua, Ante Qu, Claire Harvey, Emily Holtzman, Joy Ko, Brooks Hagan, Doug James, François Guimbretière, Steve Marschner. Weavecraft: An Interactive Design and Simulation Tool for 3D Weaving. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/weavecraft/