Category: Rigid bodies

Interlinked SPH Pressure Solvers for Strong Fluid-Rigid Coupling

Christoph Gissler, Andreas Peer, Stefan Band, Jan Bender, Matthias Teschner

We present a strong fluid-rigid coupling for SPH fluids and rigid bodies with particle-sampled surfaces. The approach interlinks the iterative pressure update at fluid particles with a second SPH solver that computes artificial pressure at rigid body particles. The introduced SPH rigid body solver models rigid-rigid contacts as artificial density deviations at rigid body particles. The corresponding pressure is iteratively computed by solving a global formulation which is particularly useful for large numbers of rigid-rigid contacts. Compared to previous SPH coupling methods, the proposed concept stabilizes the fluid-rigid interface handling. It significantly reduces the computation times of SPH fluid simulations by enabling larger time steps. Performance gain factors of up to 58 compared to previous methods are presented. We illustrate the flexibility of the presented fluid-rigid coupling by integrating it into DFSPH, IISPH and a recent SPH solver for highly viscous fluids. We further show its applicability to a recent SPH solver for elastic objects. Large scenarios with up to 90M particles of various interacting materials and complex contact geometries with up to 90k rigid-rigid contacts are shown. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed rigid body solver by comparing it to Bullet.

Interlinked SPH Pressure Solvers for Strong Fluid-Rigid Coupling

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

Methodology for Assessing Mesh-Based Contact Point Methods

Kenny Erleben

Computation of contact points is a critical sub-component of physics-based animation. The success and correctness of simulation results are very sensitive to the quality of the contact points. Hence, quality plays a critical role when comparing methods, and this is highly relevant for simulating objects with sharp edges. The importance of contact point quality is largely overlooked and lacks rigor and as such may become a bottleneck in moving the research field forward. We establish a taxonomy of contact point generation methods and lay down an analysis of what normal contact quality implies. The analysis enables us to establish a novel methodology for assessing and studying quality for mesh-based shapes. The core idea is based on a test suite of three complex cases and a small portfolio of simple cases. We apply our methodology to eight local contact point generation methods and conclude that the selected local methods are unable to provide correct information in all cases. The immediate benefit of the proposed methodology is a foundation for others to evaluate and select the best local method for their specific application. In the longer perspective, the presented work suggests future research focusing on semi-local methods.

Methodology for Assesing Mesh-Based Contact Point Methods

Cable Joints

Matthias Müller, Nuttapong Chentanez, Stefan Jeschke, Miles Macklin

Robustly and efficiently simulating cables and ropes that are part of a larger system such as cable driven machines, cable cars or tendons in a human or robot is a challenging task. To be able to adapt to the environment, cables are typically modeled as a large number of small segments that are connected via joints. The two main difficulties with this approach are to satisfy the inextensibility constraint and to handle the typically large mass ratio between the small segments and the larger objects they connect. In this paper we present a new approach which solves these problems in a simple and effective way. Our method is based on the idea to simulate the effect of the cables instead of the cables themselves. To this end we propose a new special type of distance constraint we call cable joint that changes both its attachment points and its rest length dynamically. A cable connecting a series of objects is then modeled as a sequence of cable joints which reduces the complexity of the simulation from the order of the number of segments to just the number of connected objects. This makes simulations both faster and more robust as we will demonstrate on a variety of examples.

Cable Joints

An Extended Partitioned Method for Conservative Solid-Fluid Coupling

Muzaffer Akbay, Nicholas Nobles, Victor Zoran, Tamar Shinar

We present a novel extended partitioned method for two-way solid-fluid coupling, where the fluid and solid solvers are treated as black boxes with limited exposed interfaces, facilitating modularity and code reusability. Our method achieves improved stability and extended range of applicability over standard partitioned approaches through three techniques. First, we couple the black-box solvers through a small, reduced-order monolithic system, which is constructed on the fly from input/output pairs generated by the solid and fluid solvers. Second, we use a conservative, impulse-based interaction term to couple the solid and fluid rather than typical pressure-based forces. We show that both of these techniques significantly improve stability and reduce the number of iterations needed for convergence. Finally, we propose a novel boundary pressure projection method that allows for the partitioned simulation of a fully enclosed fluid coupled to a dynamic solid, a scenario that has been problematic for partitioned methods. We demonstrate the benefits of our extended partitioned method by coupling Eulerian fluid solvers for smoke and water to Lagrangian solid solvers for volumetric and thin deformable and rigid objects in a variety of challenging scenarios. We further demonstrate our method by coupling a Lagrangian SPH fluid solver to a rigid body solver

An Extended Partitioned Method for Conservative Solid-Fluid Coupling

An Efficient Solver for Two-way Coupling Rigid Bodies with Incompressible Flow

Mridul Aanjaneya

We present an efficient solver for monolithic two-way coupled simulation of rigid bodies with incompressible fluids that is robust to poor conditioning of the coupled system in the presence of large density ratios between the solid and the fluid. Our method leverages ideas from the theory of Domain Decomposition, and uses a hybrid combination of direct and iterative solvers that exploits the low-dimensional nature of the solid equations. We observe that a single Multigrid V-cycle for the fluid equations serves as a very effective preconditioner for solving the Schur-complement system using Conjugate Gradients, which is the main computational bottleneck in our pipeline. We use spectral analysis to give some theoretical insights behind this observation. Our method is simple to implement, is entirely assembly-free besides the solid equations, allows for the use of large time steps because of the monolithic formulation, and remains stable even when the iterative solver is terminated early. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on several challenging examples of two-way coupled simulation of smoke and water with rigid bodies. To illustrate that our method is applicable to other problems, we also show an example of underwater bubble simulation.

An Efficient Solver for Two-way Coupling Rigid Bodies with Incompressible Flow

Collision-Aware and Online Compression of Rigid Body Simulations via Integrated Error Minimization

Timothy Jeruzalski, John Kanji, Alec Jacobson, David I.W. Levin

Methods to compress simulation data are invaluable as they facilitate efficient transmission along the visual effects pipeline, fast and efficient replay of simulations for visualization and enable storage of scientific data. However, all current approaches to compressing simulation data require access to the entire dynamic simulation, leading to large memory requirements and additional computational burden. In this paper we perform compression of contact-dominated, rigid body simulations in an online, error-bounded fashion. This has the advantage of requiring access to only a narrow window of simulation data at a time while still achieving good agreement with the original simulation. Our approach is simulator agnostic allowing us to compress data from a variety of sources. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm by compressing contact-dominated rigid body simulations from a number of sources, achieving compression rates of up to 360 times over raw data size.

Collision-Aware and Online Compression of Rigid Body Simulations via Integrated Error Minimization

Energized Rigid Body Fracture

Xiaokai Li, Sheldon Andrews, Ben Jones, Adam Bargteil

Compelling animation of fracture is a vital challenge for computer graphics. Methods based on continuum mechanics are physically accurate, but computationally expensive since they require computing elastic deformation. In many applications, this elastic deformation is imperceptible, so simulation methods based on rigid body dynamic with breakable constraints are popular in practice. Simply deleting constraints when thresholds on force or displacement are reached ignores the elastic energy that is stored just before fracture, which is captured by continuum mechanics based methods. Our approach computes the energy stored in these constraints when they are broken, and reintroduces it to the system as kinetic energy. As a result, our method is able to animate energetic fracture scenarios with results comparable to continuum mechanics approaches, but with the computational efficiency of rigid body simulation.

Energized Rigid Body Fracture

Fast Penetration Volume for Rigid Bodies

Dan Nirel, Dani Lischinski

Handling collisions among a large number of bodies can be a performance bottleneck in video games and many other real-time applications. We present a new framework for detecting and resolving collisions using the penetration volume as an interpenetration measure. Given two non-convex polyhedral bodies, a new sampling paradigm locates their near-contact configurations in advance, and stores associated contact information in a compact database. At runtime, we retrieve a given configuration’s nearest neighbors. By taking advantage of the penetration volume’s continuity, cheap geometric methods can use the neighbors to estimate contact information as well as a translational gradient. This results in an extremely fast, geometry-independent, and trivially parallelizable computation, which constitutes the first global volume-based collision resolution. When processing multiple collisions simultaneously on a 4-core processor, the average running cost is as low as 5 microseconds. Furthermore, no additional proximity or contact-regions queries are required. These results are orders of magnitude faster than previous penetration volume approaches.

Fast Penetration Volume for Rigid Bodies

Comparison of Mixed Linear Complementarity Problem Solvers for Multibody Simulations with Contact

Andreas Enzenhofer, Sheldon Andrews, Marek Teichmann, Jozsef Kövecses

The trade-off between accuracy and computational performance is one of the central conflicts in real-time multibody simulations, much of which can be attributed to the method used to solve the constrained multibody equations. This paper examines four mixed linear complementarity problem (MLCP) algorithms when they are applied to physical problems involving frictional contact. We consider several different, and challenging, test cases such as grasping, stability of static models, closed loops, and long chains of bodies. The solver parameters are tuned for these simulations and the results are evaluated in terms of numerical accuracy and computational performance. The objective of this paper is to determine the accuracy properties of each solver, find the appropriate method for a defined task, and thus draw conclusions regarding the applicability of each method

Comparison of Mixed Linear Complementarity Problem Solvers for Multibody Simulations with Contact