Development of comfortable and well-fitted bra pattern for customized female soft body armor through 3D design process of adaptive bust on virtual mannequin

Abstract

The performance of various protective clothing i.e., soft body armor depends mainly on material type, fabric construction and garment design. However, most female soft body armor has been designed using traditional methods which face poor ballistic protection, less fitness and comfort. These problems mainly arise from corset problem due to using current inaccurate traditional bra sizing system which considers only cup size as a description of complex three dimensional (3D) breast volumes. Besides, female body armor manufacturing using this method enforced to involve different darts to accommodate the natural curvature of the female body, i.e. bust area. This brought the weak parts at the seams while ballistic impact and revealed discomfort due to accumulated fabrics at this area. The current study introduces a novel designing technique for developing female adaptive bust volume on 3D female virtual mannequin. The adaptive bust later used to generate different volumes of breast based on parametrization. The main purpose of our approach is to solve previous design problems by using the computer-aided design (CAD) knowledge in the morphological evolution of the chest and introduced it into a 3D design process for achievement of comfortable and well fitted 3D bra design. During 3D digitized modeling process, various cutting planes in x and y-direction from the bust origin have been intersecting with the bust at several angles. This intersection would help to extract the real surface of the body contour and creates the wireframe mesh on the bust. This wireframe mesh ensued different feature points on 3D expandable bust for defining the different volumes of breast based on their cup sizes. Moreover, 3D bra pattern is developed using the adaptive volume to validate the specific obtained volume. The flattened 2D patterns from the 3D model were also compared to the corresponding traditional 2D pattern. The result indicated that the proposed method is easier to implement and can generate 2D bra patterns with satisfactory fit and comfort. This is due to the 3D pattern derived from the new method which perfectly follows the exact body contours than assuming the measurement, as done into classical 2D graphical method. The study later associates different bust cups with the front part of female body armor panel to determine the possible variation for better performance and optimal comfort. In general, this approach solves previous design problems and helps to customize bra pattern and female body armor front panel patterns using CAD knowledge in the morphological evolution of the female bust volume. Further study is required to develop seamless female front body pattern in association with the respective bust volume. This will help to customize the ballistic vest which attains the required bust volume without involving dart for better comfort, ballistic protection and fitness.