AbstractThis paper addresses the problem of simulating the mechanical behavior of cloth in computer animation, which is very important and challenging. The micro‐structure of woven fabrics leads to significantly different shear reaction from other sheet materials, which has been neglected in previous approaches of cloth simulation. Therefore, it is beneficial for cloth simulation to model the shear buckling and structural bending separately. We analyze the shear buckling yielded by the micro‐structure of woven and the dynamic bending based on the thin‐shell theory, and develop a compact implementation of the new model on mass‐spring systems. Experimental results show that the animations generated using this technique are with wrinkles and folds appearing and vanishing in a more natural way than other approaches. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.