SIGGRAPH Asia 2010

Kesen’s SIGGRAPH Asia page is here.

Physics papers…

Creature Control in a Fluid Environment

In this paper, we propose a method designed to allow creatures to actively respond to a fluid environment. We explore various objective functions in order to determine ways to direct the behavior of our creatures. Our proposed method works in conjunction with generalized body forces as well as both one-way and two-way coupled fluid forces. As one might imagine, interesting behaviors can be derived from minimizing and maximizing both drag and lift as well as minimizing the effort that a creature’s internal actuators exert. A major application for our work is the automatic specification of secondary motions, for example, certain joints can be animated while others are automatically solved for in order to satisfy the objective function.

Creature Control in a Fluid Environment

Multi-Resolution Cloth Simulation

We propose a novel, multi-resolution method to efficiently perform large-scale cloth simulation. Our cloth simulation method is based on a triangle-based energy model constructed from a cloth mesh. We identify that solutions of the linear system of cloth simulation are smooth in certain regions of the cloth mesh and solve the linear system on those regions in a reduced solution space. Then we reconstruct the original solutions by performing a simple interpolation from solutions computed in the reduced space. In order to identify regions where solutions are smooth, we propose simplification metrics that consider stretching, shear, and bending forces, as well as geometric collisions. Our multi-resolution method can be applied to many existing cloth simulation methods, since our method works on a general linear system. In order to demonstrate benefits of our method, we apply our method into four large-scale cloth benchmarks that consist of tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles. Because of the reduced computations, we achieve a performance improvement by a factor of up to one order of magnitude, with a little loss of simulation quality.

Multi-Resolution Cloth Simulation

Reconstructing Surfaces of Particle-Based Fluids Using Anisotropic Kernels

In this paper we present a novel surface reconstruction method for particle-based fluid simulators such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. In particle-based simulations, fluid surfaces are usually defined as a level set of an implicit function. We formulate the implicit function as a sum of anisotropic smoothing kernels, and the direction of anisotropy at a particle is determined by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) over the neighboring particles. In addition, we perform a smoothing step that re-positions the centers of these smoothing kernels. Since these anisotropic smoothing kernels capture the local particle distributions more accurately, our method has advantages over existing methods in representing smooth surfaces, thin streams and sharp features of fluids. Our method is fast, easy to implement, and our results demonstrate a significant improvement in the quality of reconstructed surfaces as compared to existing methods.

Reconstructing Surface of Particle-Based Fluids Using Anisotropic Kernels