Month: December 2016

Art-Directed Muscle Simulation for High-End Facial Animation

Matthew Cong, Kiran S. Bhat, Ronald Fedkiw

We propose a new framework for the simulation of facial muscle and flesh that so significantly improves the technique that it allows for immediate mainstream use of anatomically and biomechanically accurate muscle models as a bread and butter technique in a high-end production quality pipeline. The key idea is to create a blendshape system for the muscles that gives the precise directability and controllability required in a high-end production environment. The blendshape muscles are used to drive the underlying anatomically and biomechanically motivated simulation in a way that is unbound by the typical restrictions of a simulation system while still retaining the desirable degree of freedom richness that leads to high quality results. We show that we are able to target production quality facial shapes, whether from scans or an animation system, and illustrate that the resulting nonlinear simulation in-betweens are of higher quality than those obtained from traditional linear blendshapes. We also demonstrate the ability to selectively improve areas on a given blendshape using the results of a simulation, as well as the ability to edit muscle shapes and paths in order to produce directability for animator control. Then, we show how these techniques can be used to transition from one blendshape to another or even track and selectively modify an entire performance. The efficacy of our system is further demonstrated by using it to retarget animation onto new creature models given only a single static rest pose as input.

Art-Directed Muscle Simulation for High-End Facial Animation

Two-way coupling of fluids to reduced deformable bodies

Wenlong Lu, Ning Jin, Ronald Fedkiw

We propose a fully monolithic two-way coupling framework that couples incompressible fluids to reduced deformable bodies. Notably, the resulting linear system matrix is both symmetric and positive-definite. Our method allows for the simulation of interesting free-surface as well as underwater phenomena, enabling the use of reduced deformable bodies as full-fledged simulation primitives alongside rigid bodies and deformable bodies. Momentum conservation is crucial to obtaining physically correct and realistic-looking motion in a fluid environment, and we achieve this by following previous work to describe reduced deformable bodies using both a rigid frame and a reduced space deformation component. Our approach partitions forces and impulses between the reduced space and the rigid frame of the reduced deformable bodies using a projection scheme that cleanly accounts for momentum losses in the reduced space via corrections in the rigid frame, resulting in a new theoretical formulation for the momentum-conserving reduced deformable body. We demonstrate that robust and stable contact, collision, articulation, and two-way coupling with fluids are all attainable in a straightforward way using this new formulation. Compared with fully deformable objects, our framework consumes less memory and scales better in large scenes, while still nicely approximating the deformation effects.

Two-way coupling of fluids to reduced deformable bodies

Accurate Contact Modeling for Multi-rate Single-point Haptic Rendering of Static and Deformable Environments

Thomas Knott, Torsten Kuhlen

Common approaches for the haptic rendering of complex scenarios employ multi-rate simulation schemes. Here, the collision queries or the simulation of a complex deformable object are often performed asynchronously on a lower frequency, while some kind of intermediate contact representation is used to simulate interactions on the haptic rate. However, this can produce artifacts in the haptic rendering when the contact situation quickly changes and the intermediate representation is not able to reflect the changes due to the lower update rate. We address this problem utilizing a novel contact model. It facilitates the creation of contact representations that are accurate for a large range of motions and multiple simulation time-steps.We handle problematic convex contact regions using a local convex decomposition and special constraints for convex areas.We combine our accurate contact model with an implicit temporal integration scheme to create an intermediate mechanical contact representation, which reflects the dynamic behavior of the simulated objects. Moreover, we propose a new iterative solving scheme for the involved constrained dynamics problems.We increase the robustness of our method using techniques from trust region-based optimization. Our approach can be combined with standard methods for the modeling of deformable objects or constraint-based approaches for the modeling of, for instance, friction or joints. We demonstrate its benefits with respect to the simulation accuracy and the quality of the rendered haptic forces in multiple scenarios.

Accurate Contact Modeling for Multi-rate Single-point Haptic Rendering of Static and Deformable Environments