A method to construct a 3D garment model from sketched contours is presented for interactive garment design of virtual characters. Our method has three features：firstly

a reference model of 3D mannequin is established by restricting the direction of the distance field along z-axis only

so that the computation of distance field is much easier; secondly

an efficient mapping from 2D sketch to 3D garment is established by using the relative position between sketched garment contour and the outline of human projection; thirdly

the 3D garment model is constructed according to the mapping between garment grids and the grids of human model

and it ensures that loose part of garments can be constructed correctly. The experiment results prove that the proposed method can generate the garment surface constrained by sketch and adapted the underlying form of character model

and the process can be performed in real time.