Efficient Contact Modeling using Compliance Warping

Precise contact modeling is essential when simulating rigid or deformable objects in interaction. Yet, most recent work in computer graphics has focused on the computation of the motion or deformation of objects, and little has been done to model the interaction between simulated objects. In this paper, we propose a novel and very efficient approach for precise computation of contact response between various types of objects commonly used in computer animation. Our approach represents the objects motion as a free motion and a corrective motion. The corrective motion uses an efficient contact model, based on an approximation of the behavior model, but still follows Signorini and Coulomb laws for contact and friction modeling. Our approach guarantees no interpenetration at the end of the time step, and only introduces a minimal error in the objects motion. We illustrate our approach using an approximate (warped) compliance in the case of non-linear deformable models. This speeds-up the contact response by several orders of magnitude, thus allowing the simulation of scenes with many complex interacting objects.

Efficient Contact Modeling using Compliance Warping