Month: November 2013

A Semi-Lagrangian Closest Point Method for Deforming Surfaces

Stefan Auer, Rudiger Westermann

We present an Eulerian method for the real-time simulation of intrinsic fluid dynamics effects on deforming
surfaces. Our method is based on a novel semi-Lagrangian closest point method for the solution of partial
differential equations on animated triangle meshes.We describe this method and demonstrate its use to com-
pute and visualize flow and wave propagation along such meshes at high resolution and speed. Underlying
our technique is the efficient conversion of an animated triangle mesh into a time-dependent implicit repre-
sentation based on closest surface points. The proposed technique is unconditionally stable with respect to the
surface deformation and, in contrast to comparable Lagrangian techniques, its precision does not depend on
the level of detail of the surface triangulation.

A Semi-Lagrangian Closest Point Method for Deforming Surfaces

Constrainable Multigrid For Cloth

Inyong Jeon, Kwang-Jin Choi, Tae-Yong Kim, Bong-Ouk Choi, and Hyeong-Seok Ko

We present a new technique which can handle both point and sliding constraints in the multigrid (MG) framework. Although the MG method can theoretically perform as fast as O(N), the development of a clothing simulator based on the MG method calls for solving an important technical challenge: handling the constraints. Resolving constrains has been difficult in MG because there has been no clear way to transfer the constraints existing in the finest level mesh to the coarser level meshes. This paper presents a new formulation based on soft constraints, which can coarsen the constraints defined in the finest level to the coarser levels. Experiments are performed which show that the proposed method can solve the linear system up to 4–9 times faster in comparison with the modified preconditioned conjugate gradient method (MPCG) without quality degradation. The proposed method is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly applied to existing clothing simulators which are based on implicit time integration.

Constrainable Multigrid for Cloth

Multilevel Cloth Simulation using GPU Surface Sampling

N. Schmitt, Martin Knuth, Jan Bender, A. Kuijper

Today most cloth simulation systems use triangular mesh models. However, regular grids allow many optimizations as connectivity is implicit, warp and weft directions of the cloth are aligned to grid edges and distances between particles are equal. In this paper we introduce a cloth simulation that combines both model types. All operations that are performed on the CPU use a low-resolution triangle mesh while GPU-based methods are performed efficiently on a high-resolution grid representation. Both models are coupled by a sampling operation which renders triangle vertex data into a texture and by a corresponding projection of texel data onto a mesh. The presented scheme is very flexible and allows individual components to be performed on different architectures, data representations and detail levels. The results are combined using shader programs which causes a negligible overhead. We have implemented CPU-based collision handling and a GPU-based hierarchical constraint solver to simulate systems with more than 230k particles in real-time.

Multilevel Cloth Simulation using GPU Surface Sampling

Physically Based Character Skinning

Crispin Deul, Jan Bender

In this paper we present a novel multi-layer model for physically-based character skinning. In contrast to geometric approaches which are commonly used in the field of character skinning, physically-based methods can simulate secondary motion effects. Furthermore, these methods can handle collisions and preserve the volume of the model without the need of an additional post-process. Physically-based approaches are computationally more expensive than geometric methods but they provide more realistic results. Recent works in this area use finite element simulations to model the elastic behavior of skin. These methods require the generation of a volumetric mesh for the skin shape in a pre-processing step. It is not easy for an artist to model the different elastic behaviors of muscles, fat and skin using a volumetric mesh since there is no clear assignment between volume elements and tissue types. For our novel multi-layer model the mesh generation is very simple and can be performed automatically. Furthermore, the model contains a layer for each kind of tissue. Therefore, the artist can easily control the elastic behavior by adjusting the stiffness parameters for muscles, fat and skin. We use shape matching with oriented particles and a fast summation technique to simulate the elastic behavior of our skin model and a position-based constraint enforcement to handle collisions, volume conservation and the coupling of the skeleton with the deformable model. Position-based methods have the advantage that they are fast, unconditionally stable, controllable and provide visually plausible results.

Physically Based Character Skinning

Versatile Surface Tension and Adhesion for SPH Fluids

Nadir Akinci, Gizem Akinci, Matthias Teschner

Realistic handling of fluid-air and fluid-solid interfaces in SPH is a challenging problem. The main reason is that some important physical phenomena such as surface tension and adhesion emerge as a result of inter-molecular forces in a microscopic scale. This is different from scalar fields such as fluid pressure, which can be plausibly evaluated on a macroscopic scale using particles. Although there exist techniques to address this problem for some specific simulation scenarios, there does not yet exist a general approach to reproduce the variety of effects that emerge in reality from fluid air and fluid-solid interactions. In order to address this problem, we present a new surface tension force and a new adhesion force. Different from the existing work, our surface tension force can handle large surface tensions in a realistic way. This property lets our approach handle challenging real scenarios, such as water crown formation, various types of fluid-solid interactions, and even droplet simulations. Furthermore, it prevents particle clustering at the free surface where inter-particle pressure forces are incorrect. Our adhesion force allows plausible two-way attraction of fluids and solids and can be used to model different wetting conditions. By using our forces, modeling surface tension and adhesion effects do not require involved techniques such as generating a ghost air phase or surface tracking. The forces are applied to the neighboring fluidfluid and fluid-boundary particle pairs in a symmetric way, which satisfies momentum conservation. We demonstrate that combining both forces allows simulating a variety of interesting effects in a plausible way.

Versatile Surface Tension and Adhesion for SPH Fluids

Interactive Localized Liquid Motion Editing

Zherong Pan, Jin Huang, Yiying Tong, Changxi Zheng, and Hujun Bao

Animation techniques for controlling liquid simulation are challenging: they commonly require carefully setting initial and boundary conditions or performing a costly numerical optimization scheme against user-provided keyframes or animation sequences. Either way, the whole process is laborious and computationally expensive.

We introduce a novel method to provide intuitive and interactive control of liquid simulation. Our method enables a user to locally edit selected keyframes and automatically propagates the editing in a nearby temporal region using geometric deformation. We formulate our local editing techniques as a small-scale nonlinear optimization problem which can be solved interactively. With this uniformed formulation, we propose three editing metaphors, including (i) sketching local fluid features using a few user strokes, (ii) dragging a local fluid region, and (iii) controlling a local shape with a small mesh patch. Finally, we use the edited liquid animation to guide an of offline high-resolution simulation to recover more surface details. We demonstrate the intuitiveness and efficacy of our method in various practical scenarios.

Interactive Localized Liquid Motion Editing