Month: September 2018

Inverse Elastic Shell Design with Contact and Friction

Mickaël Ly, Romain Casati, Florence Bertails-Descoubes, Mélina Skouras, Laurence Boissieux

We propose an inverse strategy for modeling thin elastic shells physically, just from the observation of their geometry. Our algorithm takes as input an arbitrary target mesh, and interprets this configuration automatically as a stable equilibrium of a shell simulator under gravity and frictional contact constraints with a given external object. Unknowns are the natural shape of the shell (i.e., its shape without external forces) and the frictional contact forces at play, while the material properties (mass density, stiffness, friction coefficients) can be freely chosen by the user. Such an inverse problem formulates as an ill-posed nonlinear system subject to conical constraints. To select and compute a plausible solution, our inverse solver proceeds in two steps. In a first step, contacts are reduced to frictionless bilateral constraints and a natural shape is retrieved using the adjoint method. The second step uses this result as an initial guess and adjusts each bilateral force so that it projects onto the admissible Coulomb friction cone, while preserving global equilibrium. To better guide minimization towards the target, these two steps are applied iteratively using a degressive regularization of the shell energy. We validate our approach on simulated examples with reference material parameters, and show that our method still converges well for material parameters lying within a reasonable range around the reference, and even in the case of arbitrary meshes that are not issued from a simulation. We finally demonstrate practical inversion results on complex shell geometries freely modeled by an artist or automatically captured from real objects, such as posed garments or soft accessories.

Inverse Elastic Shell Design with Contact and Friction

An Explicit Structure Preserving numerical scheme for EPDiff

Omri Azencot, Orestis Vantzos and Mirela Ben-Chen

We present a new structure-preserving numerical scheme for solving the Euler–Poincaré Differential (EPDiff) equation on arbitrary triangle meshes. Unlike existing techniques, our method solves the difficult non-linear EPDiff equation by constructing energy preserving, yet fully explicit, update rules. Our approach uses standard differential operators on triangle meshes, allowing for a simple and efficient implementation. Key to the structure-preserving features that our method exhibits is a novel numerical splitting scheme. Namely, we break the integration into three steps which rely on linear solves with a fixed sparse matrix that is independent of the simulation and thus can be pre-factored. We test our method in the context of simulating concentrated reconnecting wavefronts on flat and curved domains. In particular, EPDiff is known to generate geometrical fronts which exhibit wave-like behavior when they interact with each other. In addition, we also show that at a small additional cost, we can produce globally-supported periodic waves by using our simulated fronts with wavefronts tracking techniques. We provide quantitative graphs showing that our method exactly preserves the energy in practice. In addition, we demonstrate various interesting results including annihilation and recreation of a circular front, a wave splitting and merging when hitting an obstacle and two separate fronts propagating and bending due to the curvature of the domain.

An Explicit Structure Preserving numerical scheme for EPDiff

Real-Time Viscous Thin Films

Orestis Vantzos, Saar Raz and Mirela Ben-Chen

We propose a novel discrete scheme for simulating viscous thin films at real-time frame rates. Our scheme is based on a new formulation of the gradient flow approach, that leads to a discretization based on local stencils that are easily computable on the GPU. Our approach has physical fidelity, as the total mass is guaranteed to be preserved, an appropriate discrete energy is controlled, and the film height is guaranteed to be non-negative at all times. In addition, and unlike all existing methods for thin films simulation, it is fast enough to allow realtime interaction with the flow, for designing initial conditions and controlling the forces during the simulation.

Real-Time Viscous Thin Films

Analytic Eigensystems for Isotropic Distortion Energies

Breannan Smith, Fernando de Goes, Theodore Kim

Many strategies exist for optimizing non-linear distortion energies in geometry and physics applications, but devising an approach that achieves the convergence promised by Newton-type methods remains challenging. In order to guarantee the positive semi-definiteness required by these methods, a numerical eigendecomposition or approximate regularization is usually needed. In this paper, we present analytic expressions for the eigensystems at each quadrature point of a wide range of isotropic distortion energies. These systems can then be used to project energy Hessians to positive semi-definiteness analytically. Unlike previous attempts, our formulation provides compact expressions that are valid both in 2D and 3D, and does not introduce spurious degeneracies. At its core, our approach utilizes the invariants of the stretch tensor that arises from the polar decomposition of the deformation gradient. We provide closed-form expressions for the eigensystems for all these invariants, and use them to systematically derive the eigensystems of any isotropic energy. Our results are suitable for geometry optimization over flat surfaces or volumes, and agnostic to both the choice of discretization and basis function. To demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, we include comparisons against existing methods on common graphics tasks such as surface parameterization and volume deformation.

Analytic Eigensystems for Isotropic Distortion Energies

I-Cloth: Incremental Collision Handling for GPU-Based Interactive Cloth Simulation

Min Tang, Tongtong Wang, Zhongyuan Liu, Ruofeng Tong, and Dinesh Manocha

We present an incremental collision handling algorithm for GPU-based interactive cloth simulation. Our approach exploits the spatial and temporal coherence between successive iterations of an optimization-based solver for collision response computation. We present an incremental continuous collision detection algorithm that keeps track of deforming vertices and combine it with spatial hashing. We use a non-linear GPU-based impact zone solver to resolve the penetrations. We combine our collision handling algorithm with implicit integration to use large time steps. Our overall algorithm, I-Cloth, can simulate complex cloth deformation with a few hundred thousand vertices at 2-8 frames per second on a commodity GPU. We highlight its performance on different benchmarks and observe up to 7-10X speedup over prior algorithms.

I-Cloth: Incremental Collision Handling for GPU-Based Interactive Cloth Simulation

Decoupling Simulation Accuracy from Mesh Quality

Teseo Schneider, Yixin Hu, Jeremie Dumas, Xifeng Gao, Daniele Panozzo, Denis Zorin

For a given PDE problem, three main factors affect the accuracy of FEM solutions: basis order, mesh resolution, and mesh element quality. The first two factors are easy to control, while controlling element shape quality is a challenge, with fundamental limitations on what can be achieved. We propose to use p-refinement (increasing element degree) to decouple the approximation error of the finite element method from the domain mesh quality for elliptic PDEs. Our technique produces an accurate solution even on meshes with badly shaped elements, with a slightly higher running time due to the higher cost of high-order elements. We demonstrate that it is able to automatically adapt the basis to badly shaped elements, ensuring an error consistent with high-quality meshing, without any per-mesh parameter tuning. Our construction reduces to traditional fixed-degree FEM methods on high-quality meshes with identical performance. Our construction decreases the burden on meshing algorithms, reducing the need for often expensive mesh optimization and automatically compensates for badly shaped elements, which are present due to boundary constraints or limitations of current meshing methods. By tackling mesh generation and finite element simulation jointly, we obtain a pipeline that is both more efficient and more robust than combinations of existing state of the art meshing and FEM algorithms.

Decoupling Simulation Accuracy from Mesh Quality

SIGGRAPH Asia 2018

Editing Fluid Animation Using Flow Interpolation

Syuhei Sato, Yoshinori Dobashi, Tomoyuki Nishita

The computational cost for creating realistic fluid animations by numerical simulation is generally expensive. In digital production environments, existing precomputed fluid animations are often reused for different scenes in order to reduce the cost of creating scenes containing fluids. However, applying the same animation to different scenes often produces unacceptable results, so the animation needs to be edited. In order to help animators with the editing process, we develop a novel method for synthesizing the desired fluid animations by combining existing flow data. Our system allows the user to place flows at desired positions, and combine them. We do this by interpolating velocities at the boundaries between the flows. The interpolation is formulated as a minimization problem of an energy function, which is designed to take into account the inviscid, incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Our method focuses on smoke simulations defined on a uniform grid. We demonstrate the potential of our method by showing a set of examples, including a large-scale sandstorm created from a few flow data simulated in a small-scale space.

Editing Fluid Animation Using Flow Interpolation

Hybrid Grains: Adaptive Coupling of Discrete and Continuum Simulations of Granular Media

Yonghao Yue*, Breannan Smith*, Peter Yichen Chen*, Maytee Chantharayukhonthorn*, Ken Kamrin, Eitan Grinspun

We propose a technique to simulate granular materials that exploits the dual strengths of discrete and continuum treatments. Discrete element simulations provide unmatched levels of detail and generality, but prove excessively costly when applied to large scale systems. Continuum approaches are computationally tractable, but limited in applicability due to built-in modeling assumptions; e.g., models suitable for granular flows typically fail to capture clogging, bouncing and ballistic motion. In our hybrid approach, an oracle dynamically partitions the domain into continuum regions where safe, and discrete regions where necessary. The domains overlap along transition zones, where a Lagrangian dynamics mass-splitting coupling principle enforces agreement between the two simulation states. Enrichment and homogenization operations allow the partitions to evolve over time. This approach accurately and efficiently simulates scenarios that previously required an entirely discrete treatment.

Hybrid Grains: Adaptive Coupling of Discrete and Continuum Simulations of Granular Media

GPU Optimization of Material Point Methods

Ming Gao*, Xinlei Wang*, Kui Wu*, Andre Pradhana, Eftychios Sifakis, Cem Yuksel, Chenfanfu Jiang

The Material Point Method (MPM) has been shown to facilitate effective simulations of physically complex and topologically challenging materials, with a wealth of emerging applications in computational engineering and visual computing. Borne out of the extreme importance of regularity, MPM is given attractive parallelization opportunities on high-performance modern multiprocessors. Parallelization of MPM that fully leverages computing resources presents challenges that require exploring an extensive design-space for favorable data structures and algorithms. Unlike the conceptually simple CPU parallelization, where the coarse partition of tasks can be easily applied, it takes greater effort to reach the GPU hardware saturation due to its many-core SIMT architecture. In this paper we introduce methods for addressing the computational challenges of MPM and extending the capabilities of general simulation systems based on MPM, particularly concentrating on GPU optimization. In addition to our open-source high-performance framework, we also conduct performance analyses and benchmark experiments to compare against alternative design choices which may superficially appear to be reasonable, but can suffer from suboptimal performance in practice. Our explicit and fully implicit GPU MPM solvers are further equipped with a Moving Least Squares MPM heat solver and a novel sand constitutive model to enable fast simulations of a wide range of materials. We demonstrate that more than an order of magnitude performance improvement can be achieved with our GPU solvers. Practical high-resolution examples with up to ten million particles run in less than one minute per frame.

GPU Optimization of Material Point Methods