Month: July 2014

A Peridynamic Perspective on Spring-Mass Fracture

Joshua A. Levine, Adam W. Bargteil, Christopher Corsi, Jerry Tessendorf, Robert Geist 

The application of spring-mass systems to the animation of brittle fracture is revisited. The motivation arises from the recent popularity of peridynamics in the computational physics community. Peridynamic systems can be regarded as spring-mass systems with two specific properties. First, spring forces are based on a simple strain metric, thereby decoupling spring stiffness from spring length. Second, masses are connected using a distance-based criterion. The relatively large radius of influence typically leads to a few hundred springs for every mass point. Spring-mass systems with these properties are shown to be simple to implement, trivially parallelized, and well-suited to animating brittle fracture.

A Peridynamic Perspective on Spring-Mass Fracture

Efficient Denting and Bending of Rigid Bodies

Saket Patkar, Mridul Aanjaneya, Aric Bartle, Minjae Lee, Ronald Fedkiw

We present a novel method for the efficient denting and bending of rigid bodies without the need for expensive finite element simulations. Denting is achieved by deforming the triangulated surface of the target body based on a dent map computed on-the-fly from the projectile body using a Z-buffer algorithm with varying degrees of smoothing. Our method accounts for the angle of impact, is applicable to arbitrary shapes, readily scales to thousands of rigid bodies, is amenable to artist control, and also works well in combination with prescoring algorithms for fracture. Bending is addressed by augmenting a rigid body with an articulated skeleton which is used to drive skinning weights for the bending deformation. The articulated skeleton is simulated to include the effects of both elasticity and plasticity. Furthermore, we allow joints to be added dynamically so that bending can occur in a nonpredetermined way and/or as dictated by the artist. Conversely, we present an articulation condensation method that greatly simplifies large unneeded branches and chains on-the-fly for increased efficiency.

Efficient Denting and Bending of Rigid Bodies

Physics-Inspired Adaptive Fracture Refinement

Zhili Chen, Miaojun Yao, Renguo Feng, Huamin Wang

Physically based animation of detailed fracture effects is not only computationally expensive, but also difficult to implement due to numerical instability. In this paper, we propose a physics-inspired approach to enrich low-resolution fracture animation by realistic fracture details. Given a custom-designed material strength field, we adaptively refine a coarse fracture surface into a detailed one, based on a discrete gradient descent flow. Using the new fracture surface, we then generate a high-resolution fracture animation with details on both the fracture surface and the exterior surface. Our experiment shows that this approach is simple, fast, and friendly to user design and control. It can generate realistic fracture animations within a few seconds.

Physics-Inspired Adaptive Fracture Refinement

Defending Continuous Collision Detection against Errors

Huamin Wang

Numerical errors and rounding errors in continuous collision detection (CCD) can easily cause collision detection failures if they are not handled properly. A simple and effective approach is to use error tolerances, as shown in many existing CCD systems. Unfortunately, finding the optimal tolerance values is a difficult problem for users. Larger tolerance values will introduce false positive artifacts, while smaller tolerance values may cause collisions to be undetected. The biggest issue here is that we do not know whether or when CCD will fail, even though failures are extremely rare. In this paper, we demonstrate a set of simple modifications to make a basic CCD implementation failure-proof. Using error analysis, we prove the safety of this method and we formulate suggested tolerance values to reduce false positives. The resulting algorithms are safe, automatic, efficient, and easy to implement.

Defending Continuous Collision Detection against Errors

Active Volumetric Musculoskeletal Systems

Ye Fan, Joshua Litven, Dinesh Pai

We introduce a new framework for simulating the dynamics of musculoskeletal systems, with volumetric muscles in close contact and a novel data-driven muscle activation model. Muscles are simulated using an Eulerian-on-Lagrangian discretization that handles volume preservation, large deformation, and close contact between adjacent tissues. Volume preservation is crucial for accurately capturing the dynamics of muscles and other biological tissues. We show how to couple the dynamics of soft tissues with Lagrangian multibody dynamics simulators, which are widely available. Our physiologically based muscle activation model utilizes knowledge of the active shapes of muscles, which can be easily obtained from medical imaging data or designed to meet artistic needs. We demonstrate results with models derived from MRI data and models designed for artistic effect.

Active Volumetric Musculoskeletal Systems

Interactive Rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations

Florian Reichl,  Matthäus G. Chajdas,  Jens Schneider, and  Rüdiger Westermann

We describe the design of an interactive rendering system for particle-based fluid simulations comprising hundreds of millions of particles per time step. We present a novel binary voxel representation for particle positions in combination with random jitter to drastically reduce memory and bandwidth requirements. To avoid a time-consuming preprocess and restrict the workload to what is seen, the construction of this representation is embedded into front-to-back GPU ray-casting. For high speed rendering, we ray-cast spheres and extend on total-variation-based image de-noising models to smooth the fluid surface according to data specific boundary conditions. The regular voxel structure permits highly efficient ray-sphere intersection testing as well as classification of foam particles at runtime on the GPU. Foam particles are rendered volumetrically by reconstructing densities from the binary representation on-the-fly. The particular design of our system allows scrubbing through high-resolution animated fluids at interactive rates.

Interactive Rendering of Giga-Particle Fluid Simulations