Category: Deformables

Thin Skin Elastodynamics

Duo Li, Shinjiro Sueda, Debanga R. Neog, Dinesh K. Pai

We present a novel approach to simulating thin hyperelastic skin. Real human skin is only a few millimeters thick. It can stretch and slide over underlying body structures such as muscles, bones, and tendons, revealing rich details of a moving character. Simulating such skin is challenging because it is in close contact with the body and shares its geometry. Despite major advances in simulating elastodynamics of cloth and soft bodies for computer graphics, such methods are difficult to use for simulating thin skin due to the need to deal with non-conforming meshes, collision detection, and contact response. We propose a novel Eulerian representation of skin that avoids all the difficulties of constraining the skin to lie on the body surface by working directly on the surface itself. Skin is modeled as a 2D hyperelastic membrane with arbitrary topology, which makes it easy to cover an entire character or object. Unlike most Eulerian simulations, we do not require a regular grid and can use triangular meshes to model body and skin geometry. The method is easy to implement, and can use low resolution meshes to animate high resolution details stored in texture-like maps. Skin movement is driven by the animation of body shape prescribed by an artist or by another simulation, and so it can be easily added as a post-processing stage to an existing animation pipeline. We provide several examples simulating human and animal skin, and skin-tight clothes.

Thin Skin Elastodynamics

Embedded Thin Shells for Wrinkle Simulation

Olivier Remillard, Paul G. Kry

We present a new technique for simulating high resolution surface wrinkling deformations of composite objects consisting of a soft interior and a harder skin. We combine high resolution thin shells with coarse finite element lattices and define frequency based constraints that allow the formation of wrinkles with properties matching those predicted by the physical parameters of the composite object. Our two-way coupled model produces the expected wrinkling behavior without the computational expense of a large number of volumetric elements to model deformations under the surface. We use C1 quadratic shape functions for the interior deformations, allowing very coarse resolutions to model the overall global deformation efficiently, while avoiding visual artifacts of wrinkling at discretization boundaries. We demonstrate that our model produces wrinkle wavelengths that match both theoretical predictions and high resolution volumetric simulations. We also show example applications in simulating wrinkles on passive objects, such as furniture, and for wrinkles on faces in character animation.

Embedded Thin Shells for Wrinkle Simulation

Efficient GPU data structures and methods to solve sparse linear systems in dynamics applications

Daniel Weber, Jan Bender, Markus Schnoes, Andre Stork and Dieter Fellner

We present GPU data structures and algorithms to efficiently solve sparse linear systems which are typically required in simulations of multibody systems and deformable bodies. Thereby, we introduce an efficient sparse matrix data structure that can handle arbitrary sparsity patterns and outperforms current state-of-the-art implementations for sparse matrix vector multiplication. Moreover, an efficient method to construct global matrices on the GPU is presented where hundreds of thousands of individual element contributions are assembled in a few milliseconds. A finite element based method for the simulation of deformable solids as well as an impulse-based method for rigid bodies are introduced in order to demonstrate the advantages of the novel data structures and algorithms. These applications share the characteristic that a major computational effort consists of building and solving systems of linear equations in every time step. Our solving method results in a speed-up factor of up to 13 in comparison to other GPU methods.

Efficient GPU data structures and methods to solve sparse linear systems in dynamics applications

Modeling Friction and Air Effects between Cloth and Deformable Bodies

Zhili Chen, Renguo Feng, Huamin Wang

Real-world cloth exhibits complex behaviors when it contacts deformable bodies. In this paper, we study how to improve the simulation of cloth-body interactions from three perspectives: collision, friction, and air pressure. We propose an efficient and robust algorithm to detect the collisions between cloth and deformable bodies, using the surface traversal technique. We develop a friction measurement device and we use it to capture frictional data from real-world experiments. The derived friction model can realistically handle complex friction properties of cloth, including anisotropy and nonlinearity. To produce pressure effects caused by the air between cloth and deformable bodies, we define an air mass field on the cloth layer and we use real-world air permeability data to animate it over time. Our results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our system in simulating objects with a three-layer structure (i.e., a cloth layer, an air layer, and an inner body layer), such as pillows, comforters, down jackets, and stuffed toys.

Modeling Friction and Air Effects between Cloth and Deformable Bodies

Robust Inside-Outside Segmentation using Generalized Winding Numbers

Alec Jacobson, Ladislav Kavan, Olga Sorkine-Hornung

Solid shapes in computer graphics are often represented with boundary descriptions, e.g. triangle meshes, but animation, physically-based simulation, and geometry processing are more realistic and accurate when explicit volume representations are available. Tetrahedral meshes which exactly contain (interpolate) the input boundary description are desirable but difficult to construct for a large class of input meshes. Character meshes and CAD models are often composed of many connected components with numerous self-intersections, non-manifold pieces, and open boundaries, precluding existing meshing algorithms. We propose an automatic algorithm handling all of these issues, resulting in a compact discretization of the input’s inner volume. We only require reasonably consistent orientation of the input triangle mesh. By generalizing the winding number for arbitrary triangle meshes, we define a function that is a perfect segmentation for watertight input and is well-behaved otherwise. This function guides a graphcut segmentation of a constrained Delaunay tessellation (CDT), providing a minimal description that meets the boundary exactly and may be fed as input to existing tools to achieve element quality. We highlight our robustness on a number of examples and show applications of solving PDEs, volumetric texturing and elastic simulation.

Robust Inside-Outside Segmentation using Generalized Winding Numbers

Interactive Authoring of Simulation-Ready Plants

Yili Zhao, Jernej Barbič

Physically based simulation can produce quality motion of plants, but requires an authoring stage to convert plant “polygon soup” triangle meshes to a format suitable for physically based simulation. We give a system that can author complex simulation-ready plants in a manner of minutes. Our system decomposes the plant geometry, establishes a hierarchy, builds and connects simulation meshes, and detects instances. It scales to anatomically realistic geometry of adult plants, is robust to non-manifold input geometry, gaps between branches or leaves, free-flying leaves not connected to any branch, spurious geometry, and plant self-collisions in the in- put configuration. We demonstrate the results using a FEM model reduction simulator that can compute large-deformation dynamics of complex plants at interactive rates, subject to user forces, gravity or randomized wind. We also provide plant fracture (with pre-specified patterns), inverse kinematics to easily pose plants, as well as interactive design of plant material properties. We authored and simulated over 100 plants from diverse climates and geographic regions, including broadleaf (deciduous) trees and conifers, bushes and flowers. Our largest simulations involve anatomically realistic adult trees with hundreds of branches and over 100,000 leaves.

Interactive Authoring of Simulation-Ready Plants

Near-exhaustive Precomputation of Secondary Cloth Effects

Doyub Kim, Woojong Koh, Rahul Narain, Kayvon Fatahalian, Adrien Treuille, James F. O’Brien

The central argument against data-driven methods in computer graphics rests on the curse of dimensionality: it is intractable to precompute “everything” about a complex space. In this paper, we challenge that assumption by using several thousand CPU-hours to perform a massive exploration of the space of secondary clothing effects on a character animated through a large motion graph. Our system continually explores the phase space of cloth dynamics, incrementally constructing a secondary cloth motion graph that captures the dynamics of the system. We find that it is possible to sample the dynamical space to a low visual error tolerance and that secondary motion graphs containing tens of gigabytes of raw mesh data can be compressed down to only tens of megabytes. These results allow us to capture the effect of high-resolution, off-line cloth simulation for a rich space of character motion and deliver it efficiently as part of an interactive application.

Near-exhaustive Precomputation of Secondary Cloth Effects

Eulerian-on-Lagrangian Simulation

Ye Fan, Joshua Litven, David I.W. Levin, Dinesh K. Pai

We describe an Eulerian-on-Lagrangian solid simulator that reduces or eliminates many of the problems experienced by fully Eulerian methods but retains its advantages. Our method does not require the construction of an explicit object discretization and the fixed nature of the simulation mesh avoids tangling during large deformations. By introducing Lagrangian modes to the simulation we enable unbounded simulation domains and reduce the time-step restrictions which can plague Eulerian simulations. Our method features a new solver that can resolve contact between multiple objects while simultaneously distributing motion between the Lagrangian and Eulerian modes in a least-squares fashion. Our method successfully bridges the gap between Lagrangian and Eulerian simulation methodologies without having to abandon either one.

Eulerian-on-Lagrangian Simulation

Position-based Methods for the Simulation of Solid Objects in Computer Graphics

Jan Bender, Matthias Müller, Miguel A. Otaduy and Matthias Teschner

The dynamic simulation of solids has a long history in computer graphics. The classical methods in this field are based on the use of forces or impulses to simulate joints between rigid bodies as well as the stretching, shearing and bending stiffness of deformable objects. In the last years the class of position-based methods has become popular in the graphics community. These kinds of methods are fast, unconditionally stable and controllable which make them well-suited for the use in interactive environments. Position-based methods are not as accurate as force based methods in general but they provide visual plausibility. Therefore, the main application areas of these approaches are virtual reality, computer games and special effects in movies.

This state of the art report covers the large variety of position-based methods that were developed in the field of deformable solids. We will introduce the concept of position-based dynamics, present dynamic simulation based on shape matching and discuss data-driven approaches. Furthermore, we will present several applications for these methods.

Position-based Methods for the Simulation of Solid Objects in Computer Graphics

Vega: Non-Linear FEM Deformable Object Simulator

Fun Shing Sin, Daniel Schroeder, Jernej Barbic

This practice and experience paper describes a robust C++ implementation of several non-linear solid three-dimensional deformable object strategies commonly employed in computer graphics, named the Vega finite element method (FEM) simulation library. Deformable models supported include co-rotational linear FEM elasticity, Saint–Venant Kirchhoff FEM model, mass–spring system and invertible FEM models: neo-Hookean, Saint–Venant Kirchhoff and Mooney–Rivlin. We provide several timestepping schemes, including implicit Newmark and backward Euler integrators, and explicit central differences. The implementation of material models is separated from integration, which makes it possible to employ our code not only for simulation, but also for deformable object control and shape modelling. We extensively compare the different material models and timestepping schemes. We provide practical experience and insight gained while using our code in several computer animation and simulation research projects.

Vega: Non-Linear FEM Deformable Object Simulator